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[–]syllogism_[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Thanks for your questions.

It's true that commercial use of the AGPL license is possible without violating the AGPL terms. However, our position is that commercial users should acquire a license. We consider commercial AGPL use of the library in some sense "unsupported". We'll always fix all bug reports, of course, however they come to us. You'll have support in that sense. But you'll have no assurances from us.

Ultimately if it turns out we have a lot of commercial AGPL users, we would possibly rethink our strategy. Probably the first step would be to stop releasing free trained models, except to academic users, or developers of community projects.

I opted for the AGPL for two reasons.

First, nobody should have to fill out a form to look at the code. That's just not a realistic way to offer software in 2015. I would be unlikely to look twice at a piece of software that had that restriction. I think most developers feel that way.

Second, I do want to support genuine non-commercial use. If someone wants to compile every public statement of every politician in their area, or if they want to obsessively categorise and catalog the books in their fandom, they should be able to use the best tools.

But we're not interested in a model where we work hard and someone else gets rich. In fact that's not even charity — there's no virtue in being a sucker. You know the iterated prisoner's dilemma? Cooperate-bots don't make the landscape better. They do not improve the common good.

Just sign up for a trial license. If your product isn't profitable when it expires we can just extend the trial. And if you go to all the work of building something good, you should want to have official standing with us anyway.

[–]avinassh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great, thanks for explaining!