Tuesday, March 25, 2008

451 on AGPL

Jay Layman of the 451 group wrote a post on AGPL, which I found quite interesting (I am biased, of course ;-)

His question is if AGPL is half empty or half full. In particular, he wrote:
Google’s license choices and glass-half-empty approach may end up costing the vendor some of its dominance in the future
This ties nicely with my suggested business model for the future... I believe Google should rethink its strategy around open source, be more open and gain from the power of a community, also for its core.

Jay adds:
Similar to how open source software has historically been among the only effective weapons to fight market and monopoly powers such as Microsoft, the AGPLv3 may elevate the more collaborative, more transparent and productive communities above those that continue to leverage old GPL loopholes. In other words, there are more advantages to GPL-style collaboration, community and cachet (glass half-full) than there are disadvantages to having to share code.
Can't agree more :-)