Plausible relicenses to AGPL [LWN.net]

Plausible, a web-analytics package that was reviewed here in June, has announced a move from the MIT license to the Affero GPL, version 3. "This change makes no difference to any of you who subscribe to Plausible Cloud or who self-host Plausible, but it may upset a few corporations who tried to use our software to directly compete with us without contributing back."

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Plausible relicenses to AGPL

Posted Dec 5, 2020 12:22 UTC (Sat) by scherrey (guest, #101038) [Link] (3 responses)

We were evaluating a few systems to adopt and, being fans of Elixir, were all set to go for Plausible. However this license change completely takes them out of the running. In their explanation for why they went with APGL 3, they snort, "Google is opposed to the AGPL and state: “Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MUST NOT be used at Google”." Well guess what - so are a LOT of smart companies.

We happen to have some Elixir capabilities in our company. And we would submit SOME improvements back to the community. But we also have private infrastructure stuff that makes no sense to open source and would actually not be in ours or our clients' interests to do so. With the AGPL 3 we can't deploy any proprietary changes to our own internal infrastructure that would make sense for precisely zero external users without making them open source.

So Plausible's snide naive comments on their site https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses only go to confirm that they're definitely not a company that anyone who needs responsible and reliable vendors should depend on. There are a lot better ways of accomplishing what they claim are their objectives than to impose such a stupid invasive & viral license upon their customers.