Inspired by posts like this by Andris Reinman^0, by the French court's 14-year saga to enforce GPL (echoes of David v Goliath, there), and also by the shady behavior of some of my own customers, I've decided to reverse an approximately year old decision to go open source with AGPL, instead option for a non-commercial license, with purchasable commercial options.
While we had very good business over the last 3.5 years offering a remote browser web app component for commercial licensing and customization, a non-insignificant number of shady practices by some potential customers has been increasing in the last few months. My conclusion is that AGPL-3.0 can in certain cases, such as with BrowserBox where it really is more a comprehensive product, less a plug-in-able utility or function, create the wrong incentives and tempt otherwise non-evil actors to try to evade license compliance in various deceptive ways.
While we had very good business over the last 3.5 years offering a remote browser web app component for commercial licensing and customization, a non-insignificant number of shady practices by some potential customers has been increasing in the last few months. My conclusion is that AGPL-3.0 can in certain cases, such as with BrowserBox where it really is more a comprehensive product, less a plug-in-able utility or function, create the wrong incentives and tempt otherwise non-evil actors to try to evade license compliance in various deceptive ways.
0: https://docs.emailengine.app/how-i-turned-my-open-source-pro...
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39587344