I disagree. It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. With AGPLv3, at least legally the competitor needs to publish their modifications as well. This in turn makes it more likely the competitor will not use your code, or if they do, in accordance with the license, which would be fine, and users of the product you build will mostly not care, because they don't even know what the licenses are about.

▲

jaredklewis 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, but you're skipping the first part where if you make your project AGPLv3 most users will just choose a different project doing the same thing but with an MIT license.

I agree that if you can somehow achieve widespread adoption with a copy left license (like Linux or Wordpress), then that will be better for you. But IME copyleft licenses are a major hurdle to widespread adoption, so such projects remain obscure.

I'm not saying it is a good thing, but I've never worked at a company where we were allowed to bring in copyleft dependencies (even though everything invariably runs on Linux, which is GPLv2).

	▲	zelphirkalt 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		If it stays obscure, that isn't necessarily too bad. You respect your users and grant them the freedoms, if they seek them, but if not then that's their choice. It is merely geared against competitors taking and running, making a "better" (moaaar features) closed source version.

▲

roncesvalles 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

None of the limitations of open-source licenses apply to the authors themselves. (author = the person or organization whose name appears in the copyright notice). I.e., you can have a MIT/GPL/AGPL licensed project, but have a "premium" fork/derivation/later-version of it that's completely closed source.

I actually see this as a valuable incentive to open-sourcing under MIT -- if a commercial provider of your software emerges, it will help you test/prove that a commercial market for your software exists, after which point you can completely close-source it and pivot to purely commercial competition.

Open-sourcing, then, is basically baiting the waters to see if anyone sees commercial potential in your work. And the minute that's validated, you get funding and start your company.

	▲	zelphirkalt 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Close-sourcing a previously open source project is like a deathwish for that project. Will meet much aversion, and if the project is important, people will fork whatever the last open source version was. Then you usually lost all cards and don't have a business at all.

▲

madeofpalk 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run.

Importantly - any competitor can grab it and modify it to make it easier for them to run at scale and keep those changes closed-source.