Affero General Public License – AGPL
Jul 27, 2008 – 10:58 by Ryan
There are a lot of open source licenses available. Based on what you want to accomplish, choosing the correct license is important. What people don’t commonly understand is the difference between open source and the freedom to do whatever you want with the source. There has been a bit of controversy surrounding the Affero General Public License so we decided to do a bit of research on the license.
In a nutshell, the core concept behind AGPL is that if your applications links to an AGPL licensed library and you make your product/service available via a network service, then your application must also be open source.
We reviewed the following pages in our research:
- GPLv3 and Software as a Service
- GNU Affero Genenal Public License
- Affero General Public License (Wikipedia)
- Network Service (Wikipedia)
- Application Service Provider (Wikipedia)
- GNU General Public License (Wikipedia)
- Google’s festering problem with the AGPL
- The AGPL in Simple Words
Image courtesy of the Free Software Foundation.
One Response to “Affero General Public License – AGPL”
Breck (and lawyers) crafted a new kind of royalty-free license for LingPipe because he didn’t think GPL was strong enough to protect Alias-i’s business interests.
The goal was similar to the Affero GPL, but the license focused on the data. Breck didn’t want people using our product to process a ton of proprietary data for free. On the other hand, Breck was willing to risk companies putting up servers based on our software and open-source data. So in some ways (server deployment), our license is to the right (in the copyleft sense) of AGPL, and in other ways (data), to the left.
Over the past five or six years, Alias-i has taken a ton of flak for LingPipe having a “non-standard” license with no official “open source” stamp of approval. For instance, Alias-i can’t contribute to Java One’s open source track or O’Reilly open source events.
To make life simpler, I’ve been urging Breck to switch LingPipe over to the AGPL in our next major release. I think it’ll probably happen.
It would’ve been been interesting to see what would’ve happened to MySQL if they’d gone with AGPL. I’m guessing far less uptake.
By Bob Carpenter on Jun 25, 2009