Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@Aurora12
Last active October 16, 2025 16:31
Show Gist options
  • Select an option

  • Save Aurora12/e1835d6d2a627b09c79fc414853651e3 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.

Select an option

Save Aurora12/e1835d6d2a627b09c79fc414853651e3 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
A note on AGPL licenses

Avoid using any product under AGPL v3 as a part of your software

And, while AGPL v2 may be passable under certain conditions, we'd better avoid it altogether.

Examples and articles

Google internally forbids using AGPL-licensed products for its projects and has a nice explanation of the reasoning.

Here is a good overview of the problem.

Background

AGPL v3 was created specifically to close the "networking loophole" where in AGPL v2 you were not forced to open-source your software if you shipped an AGPL component with your system as-is and only used it through a network API. AGPL v3 forbids this specifically.

SaaS systems can get away with AGPL v3 because they don't distribute the software.

On-prem / self-hosted software can't use AGPL v3 components even if they are unmodified: you then have to open-source the whole code of the system.

AGPL is very vague, so trying to invent a loophole is also very risky. AGPL v3 ideology is particularly zealous.

Additionally, it's rather hard to convince investors to give you money to build a system they won't own the code of. So opening everything is not an option for a product like ours. Arguably, there may be a chance of our platform getting open-sourced at some point in the distant future. But this is something to consider when we are successful with it.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment