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Normalize the use of for its original purpose: to help protect the freedoms of the end-users of networked services like , not to help build a proprietary software business model (in which alternative commercial licenses are sold because the obligations of AGPLv3 are "scary").

(Personal opinion).

One might ask, "Why does the license exist? Who is it for?"

You can find answers in the talk that Bradley M. Kuhn, Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence of @conservancy@mastodon.technology, gave at in 2013.

for
ebb.org/bkuhn/talks/SCALE-2013

ebb.orgAffero GPLv3: Why It Exists & Who It’s For?

It's interesting to look back on this talk, given in February of 2013, that begins with the framing of the "Application Service Provider loophole":
"""
Rather, the authors of the GPLv2 did not foresee the dramatic takeoff of web applications—and that was not a failure, strictly speaking, since no one can foresee the future.
"""

Bradley went on to say,
"""
the community needs to be aware that the AGPL can be—and often is—abused. This is usually done through "up-selling" and license enforcement done with a profit motive, he said. MySQL AB (now owned by Oracle) is the most prominent example;
"""

So, Bradley *did* foresee the future of abuse. Only a few months later, Oracle changed the license of to AGPLv3.

lwn.net/Articles/557820/

lwn.netDebian, Berkeley DB, and AGPLv3 [LWN.net]

@egallager I looked around, but haven't seen a login. @karen just moved to a new instance. Maybe she can convince Bradley to set it up. 😉

@msw @karen or better yet set it up *for* him! (you know, since Bradley is busy and all)

@msw @drewdevault The one thing that stands put for me is
the case where somebody hopes google hires them to further non-AGPL code bases that they find valuable, like an informal anonymous internship. Perhaps people in this situation would do better to dual license, like Cygnus did with cygwin.

@msw I was gonna make a hilarious joke about article topics that get read once per decade, but the truth of it is that licenses last a long, long time and that's why deep thinking about them is so indispensable....