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SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Posted Mar 14, 2013 10:54 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418)
Parent article: SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

The article needs a correction. The MySQL thing was with nonaffero gpl. And after that, some explanation of why the AGPL is sometimes preferred for proprietary relicensing schemes might be in order.

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Posted Mar 14, 2013 13:01 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]

> The article needs a correction. The MySQL thing was with nonaffero gpl.

Clarification, perhaps, but it isn't incorrect. The MySQL model is referred to as "proprietary relicensing", and works by scaring people into buying a proprietary license by claiming that uses may infringe the license. It worked well for them, economically, and the AGPL has the unfortunate side-effect of allowing the same practises in the web space. Hopefully that makes things clearer?

I haven't actually seen anybody do this with the AGPL, but that's probably as I'm blessedly able to stay away from web programming for the most part - I expect bkuhn has examples.

SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Posted Mar 14, 2013 13:11 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

The article states that the MySQL business model exploited alleged GPL non-compliance, but the point being made is that other parties appear to be doing something similar with the AGPL, not that MySQL or Oracle did so with the AGPL.

I actually found the whole story of the GPL 2.2 very interesting, and it's unfortunate that at the very least the wider public weren't made aware of this potential (but obviously unavailable) licensing option.

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