KOReader: a free electronic-book reader for e-ink devices

Posted Apr 19, 2022 19:50 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: KOReader: a free electronic-book reader for e-ink devices by dsommers
Parent article: KOReader: a free electronic-book reader for e-ink devices

My mind may be naturally convoluted or something, but I see the AGPL as having some... odd assumptions about what interfaces network-facing programs (should be expected to) offer.

I also see it as being the foundation stone of a particularly noxious "open core" strategy for a player with deep pockets. Publish, under the AGPL, an "open core" to which you hold 100% of the copyrights, run a considerably extended proprietary build of the software as a paid network service, and do not accept community contributions to your core.

People whose needs are small enough that billing them is more hassle than it's worth can use your "core" offering for free, but your competitors can't build a proprietary platform on top of it because you've AGPL'd the core.

(I'm pretty sure I didn't come up with this idea independently, btw.)

KOReader: a free electronic-book reader for e-ink devices

Posted Apr 20, 2022 7:40 UTC (Wed) by dsommers (subscriber, #55274) [Link] (2 responses)

> I also see it as being the foundation stone of a particularly noxious "open core" strategy for a player with deep pockets. Publish, under the AGPL, an "open core" to which you hold 100% of the copyrights, run a considerably extended proprietary build of the software as a paid network service, and do not accept community contributions to your core.

My understanding of the Affero licenses is that a commercial company owning the source code and taking the "open core" approach would need to dual license the code to get away from the Affero GPL aspects. Otherwise, they will need to provide the full source of the running service component upon request.

That said, this open sourced service component could probably access other non-open source components over a network socket, where the source code of the the latter part would not need to be revealed.

KOReader: a free electronic-book reader for e-ink devices

Posted Apr 20, 2022 18:00 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

>My understanding of the Affero licenses is that a commercial company owning the source code and taking the "open core" approach would need to dual license the code to get away from the Affero GPL aspects. Otherwise, they will need to provide the full source of the running service component upon request.

I don't see how publishing part of Software You Completely Own under the Affero GPL has any legal relevance to what you do with the full version of Software You Completely Own running on Hardware You Own, except possibly by some probably-fragile argument based on estoppel doctrines.

KOReader: a free electronic-book reader for e-ink devices

Posted Apr 22, 2022 2:19 UTC (Fri) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

To be clear: I prefer these sorts of dual licensing situations to just keeping everything closed, but I probably wouldn't want to try and build a company on top of AGPL code that I didn't have the copyrights for.