On Monday, July 18, 2016 at 4:45:37 AM UTC-7, rog wrote: > > On 16 July 2016 at 16:33, Daniel Theophanes <kard...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > > I would also note that AGPL is probably unusable in most Go programs > > (statically linked and all). -Daniel > > Why so? You just need to make your program open source, which shouldn't > be too onerous a requirement I'd've thought. > IANAL, but the viral nature of the AGPL might be an issue.
Just to be clear, I understand your business proposition, and if it works for you to use the AGPL, then you should do that. I'm just addressing the question of how the use of the license plays out. Any project that builds upon your project is effectively also under the AGPL, whether or not they want to provide their extensions under a different open source license. In fact, allowing downstream developers to use a different license than AGPL is just asking for trouble. The exceptions you've provided for open source use probably make perfect sense to a lawyer, but to a developer downstream of this, it is one more thing that they have to keep track of. Imagine a poor user who does a "go get" of a library built upon your library, and they vendor it into their source tree. They might not notice that the go get operation pulled down a dependency that is licensed differently from the dependency that they were fetching. If you're lucky, the dependent library will include a license file that explicitly declares the dependency. If your unlucky, developers who are not lawyers won't notice the constraint, and it will end up causing people headache, just because it deviates from the community norm of a BSD or Apache style license. I don't know that there's an easy way to solve this, because the chosen license fits a known open source business model. Eric. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
