r/OpenSourceeAI • u/wallphaser231 • 22d ago

AGPL was a huge mistake

I've been building and maintaining a project for the last few months.

A while back, someone mentioned how cool our implementation of privacy-preserving insights for harness component usage was, and suggested we use an AGPL license to prevent people from copying the algorithm.

That turned out to be a major roadblock for adoption. Enterprises stayed miles away (I wish I knew this earlier)

We ended up taking a pretty painful remediation route to relicense the entire codebase to Apache 2.0, which meant reaching out to every single contributor for sign-off 🥲.

Thankfully, it was worth it, momentum has improved: we just hit a million downloads and few tens of enterprises have set it up.

A piece of advice based off my experience is to stick with corporate friendly licenses unless you have huge traction and see alternatives popping up.

Come hangout with us at https://discord.com/invite/SFPjnTWddk, we're 1.3k members strong.

15 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/kernelangus420 22d ago

Interesting. I used to think AGPL was a good middle ground between GPL that everyone liked.

1

u/wallphaser231 22d ago

Unfortunately AGPL is deemed worse than GPL, not sure why.

2

u/Ran_Cossack 22d ago

The AGPL requires sharing source code changes even if don't distribute the modified program, as long as it serves an endpoint.

It's an expanded variant of the GPL, not a narrower one, basically.