AFERO GPL Panel discussion - FOSDEM 04 #

The panel started with a bit of history of the AGPL: Born in the age of growing ASP (application service provider) businesses AGPL tried to fix the hosting loop whole in GPL in the early 2000s. More than ten years later it turns out the license hasn’t quite caught traction: On the one hand the license does have a few wording issues. In addition it is still rather young and used by few so there is less trust compared to GPL or ASL to last when put on trial. However there’s another reason for low adoption:

Those that are being targeted with the license – people developing web services – tend to prefer permissive licenses over copyleft ones (see Django, Rails for example). People are still in the postion of trying to gain strong positions when opening up their infrastructure. As a result there is a general preference for permissive licenses. Also there are many more people working on open source not as their hobby project but as their general day job. As a result the number of people backing projects that are infrastructure only, company driven and trying to establish de-facto standards through the availability of free software is growing.

Depressing for the founders of AGPL are businesses using the AGPL to try and trick corporations into using their software as open source and later go after them with additional clauses in their terms and conditions to enforce subscription based services.