agpl license

[dertom95]

Hi there, first of all thx for the effort to create an open source-alternative for all that social-libraries.

I just started to have a look and stumbled over the agpl license for the server. As with all licenses I'm not 100% but very sure, that that means, as soon as you are just using an agpl-licensed product in your own product (no matter if you integrate or just use its rest-api) you are forced to opensource your product to every user of your project. (according to gpl that just forces to do this if you link against it)

I recently had the same problem with the neo4j-database that has chosen gpl (nice for server) in the community edition but agpl on the enterprise edition which prevents a closed-source project (no matter if integrating it or just calling its rest-layer).

So my question is, is this license chosen on purpose for the same reason? Are you double licensing the server for commerically used closed source games?

EDIT: Ok, i just found out that the clients are licensed under apache-license, so it is easy, thx. Nevertheless that does still mean that it is not possible to write your own client without agpl to take over the whole project, right!?

[dertom95]

Ok, I rethought the thing again and I doubt that just telling the client is Apache-Licensed is enough. You will have to add kind of exception to the server's agpl-license that excludes your client-library and its users from the burden to open-source their code.
Even though I'm sure you meant this, the licenses (seems) to say something different.
...sorry for being so annoying on this, but I think this need to be clarified.

[suneets]

Thanks for the feedback-- would the following example help alleviate your concerns?

http://blog.mongodb.org/post/103832439/the-agpl

The relevant section for mongo says:

To say this another way: if you modify the core database source code, the goal is that you have to contribute those modifications back to the community.
Note however that it is NOT required that applications using mongo be published. The copyleft applies only to the mongod and mongos database programs. This is why Mongo DB drivers are all licensed under an Apache license. > You application, even though it talks to the database, is a separate program and “work”.

Our goal is very similar-- if you modify the core server code, you contribute back those modifications, but using our clients in your application is a separate program.