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Updated last year

A Developer's Perspective on Your Open-source Web Builder

At a glance

The post is from a community member who is excited about the open-source web builder app they discovered on Rockethub. They have a couple of questions about the AGPL-3 license used for the app:

1) The community member wonders if there is a specific reason for choosing the AGPL-3 license.

2) They are interested in contributing to the app and creating extensions or plugins, and want to know if those would also need to be licensed under AGPL-3.

The comments provide some insights:

- The AGPL-3 license was chosen to prevent large companies from building on top of the app without open-sourcing their work and competing with the original product.

- Extensions and plugins would also need to be licensed under AGPL-3 or a more permissive license like MIT.

- The community member also asks about the differences between GPL2 and GPL3, and whether inspired work would need to be licensed under GPLv3.

- The community member also references a blog post from the app's creators about commercial features, and wonders if that means the creators can have proprietary parts of the code.

There is no explicitly marked answer in the

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ccmdaltctr
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Hey there! I'm really happy to be here, and I just wanted to say how excited I was when I came across your app on Rockethub.

First and foremost, a big thank you to the founders and the Webstudio team for making the app open-source. As a developer, I'm constantly looking to expand my knowledge, so it's incredible to have the opportunity to delve into the source code and see how a web builder like this is created. However, I do have a couple of questions regarding the choice of licensing you went with.

1) I wondered if there's a specific reason for choosing AGPL-3.

2) As a developer, I'm interested in contributing to the app and potentially creating some extensions or plugins for it in the future. Would my extension/plugin also need to be licensed under AGPL-3?


Looking forward to your response!
O
c
9 comments
OOleg Isonen
1 - yes, to prevent big companies building on top of it without open sourcing and then competing directly with us as a cloud offering. Its not about regular users, its about companies who have massive resources and can harm this product by doing the above.
OOleg Isonen
2 - yes, or even more permissive e.g. MIT
OOleg Isonen
MIT - "I can use it for free, get all the value, extend it, never contribute back"
AGPL - "I can use it for free, but if I extend it, I have to contribute back or alternatively buy a separate license"
ccmdaltctr
Wow, thank you so much for getting back to me!

Regarding point 1: Just to give you an example, WordPress is licensed under gpl2. What I've noticed is that some cloud hosting companies have the capability to deploy the hosted version of WordPress without actually publishing the deployed version. However, some companies do publish the dockerized version of WordPress, (making it compatible with their cloud hosting).

Now, when it comes to plugin developers who create plugins for WordPress, they also don't publish the premium version of their code. Do you think both of these actions are direct violations of the GPL?

Moving on to point 2: If so, this is where the difference between gpl2 and gpl3 comes in: The gpl3 allows for more compatibility with other permissive licenses. Did I get this correct?

And now for an extra question:

3) So, in terms of the viral definition of GPL licenses, if someone is inspired by the codebase of Webstudio, would their resulting product have to be in GPLv3 or could they choose other permissive licenses?
ccmdaltctr
I read your blog post: https://webstudio.is/blog/sustainable-open-source

Under Commercial Features:
"However, if the feature is mostly necessary only for companies and organizations, then it will not be part of the Open Source Builder and we will require them to purchase it."

So that also means, that in GPLv3, the author can make some parts of the code not GPL, i.e. proprietary?
OOleg Isonen
Lots of questions, I would have to dig deep to answer
OOleg Isonen
3 - if they are inspired there is no reason for license to get applied. If they copied all the code then its a different story
OOleg Isonen
No it just means the company has to purchase from us a license and then do whatever they want if that's part of that new license. Our public license is for people who don't need to talk to us.
ccmdaltctr
Thanks, Oleg; I'm looking forward to knowing more of your thoughts about this. 🙂
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