<story><title>Why we’re changing to the AGPL license</title><url>https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mtlynch</author><text>One downside they don&amp;#x27;t mention is that the license restricts who can contribute to your project.&lt;p&gt;When I worked at Google (2014-2018), it was easy to get permission to contribute to open source projects as long as the license was BSD, MIT, or Apache 2.0. The more restrictive licenses like GPL 2 or AGPL, I think Google either flat out denied or you had to do a lot more work to get permission.&lt;p&gt;Now that I work for myself, I much prefer not having to ask anyone for permission to contribute to open source, but I generally default to MIT&amp;#x2F;Apache2 unless I have a reason to do otherwise, out of consideration for employees at Google or other corps who may want to participate in my project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cycloptic</author><text>&amp;gt; One downside they don&amp;#x27;t mention is that the license restricts who can contribute to your project.&lt;p&gt;In that case Google&amp;#x27;s policy is what is restricting you, not the license. The AGPL doesn&amp;#x27;t say you can&amp;#x27;t contribute if you work for Google. I&amp;#x27;m sure AGPL users (like the company in TFA) wouldn&amp;#x27;t mind if Google reversed their policy and gave their employees permission to contribute.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why we’re changing to the AGPL license</title><url>https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mtlynch</author><text>One downside they don&amp;#x27;t mention is that the license restricts who can contribute to your project.&lt;p&gt;When I worked at Google (2014-2018), it was easy to get permission to contribute to open source projects as long as the license was BSD, MIT, or Apache 2.0. The more restrictive licenses like GPL 2 or AGPL, I think Google either flat out denied or you had to do a lot more work to get permission.&lt;p&gt;Now that I work for myself, I much prefer not having to ask anyone for permission to contribute to open source, but I generally default to MIT&amp;#x2F;Apache2 unless I have a reason to do otherwise, out of consideration for employees at Google or other corps who may want to participate in my project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joerichey</author><text>As a current Google employee, the OSS contribution process has gotten way better. Basically, anything that is BSD&amp;#x2F;MIT&amp;#x2F;Apache&amp;#x2F;LGPL&amp;#x2F;GPL&amp;#x2F;EPL&amp;#x2F;MPL no longer needs approval.&lt;p&gt;AGPL and the non-commercial licenses are still banned.&lt;p&gt;Edit: The Google OSS contribution guidelines are actually public, if anyone wants to take a look: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;opensource.google&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;patching&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;opensource.google&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;patching&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>