People who use GPLv3 want the code to stay open/libre under any circumstances. If this is the goal, why not use the AGPL instead, even for applications which are not served over a network?

This takes away the possibility that people integrate parts of your program into a proprietary network application, even if this seems improbable. There’s nothing to loose with using this license, but potentially some gain.

Only reason I can think of is that AGPL is less known and trusted which may harm adoption.

  • cbarrick@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    AGPL is a sure-fire way to steer off corporate support.

    GPL is usually fine for corporate use.

    For example, Google and Meta actively contribute to Linux (GPL) but neither would ever touch an AGPL project for fear of infecting their other IP.

    • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      You make it sound as if corporations actually contribute a lot to open source projects they use. That is not the case in 99.9% of all cases where corporations decide to use some open source project.

      If you are lucky as an open source maintainer you get a few patches from devs using their private email addresses to sneak the contribution around the legal department, but even that is rare. What you will see is random requests from company users to provide an SBOM for the entire project right now or bug reports asking to fix something right now.

      So I seriously doubt you loose out when using AGPL or GPL.

      • cbarrick@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Linux, coreutils, LLVM, GCC, Chromium, Firefox, V8, Python, Postgres, Java, systemd, kubernetes, Docker, Bazel, Buck, Abseil, Guice, Fedora, Ubuntu, Android, Hadoop, Apache, Nginx, Spark, TensorFlow, PyTorch…

        Yeah, companies never contributed to open source.

        • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          Most of your examples are projects started by a company. The very few remaining are those 0.01% that got lucky.

          My point stands: When you start an open source project, there is no need to worry about what companies might like or not. You will not get money from anyone.