Licensing
AGPL[edit]
Clever company founders figured out how to “have their cake and eat it too”. Here is the strategy. First take VC money and develop some new piece of software. Divide the software into two parts – (a) the part that looks nice but is missing major functionality and (b) the super-awesome add-ons to that software that really rock. You license (a) using the AGPL3 and license (b) as all rights reserved and never release that source code.
You then stand up a cloud instance of the software that combines (a) and (b) and not allow any self-hosted versions of the software which might entail handing your (b) source code to your customers.
Since the (a) portion is incomplete it poses no threat to their commercial cloud offering. And since the (a) part is AGPL it is impossible for a multi-vendor commercial ecosystem to emerge. If a small commercial competitor wants to augment the (a) code to compete with the initial vendor that has (a)+(b) running in the cloud, they are bound by the AGPL3 license to publish all of their improvements. This means that if the second company comes up with a better idea than the original company – the original company gets it and any and all competitors of the second company get the improvement for free as well. But if the original company makes an improvement – they keep it hidden and proprietary thus extending their advantage over all other commercial participants in the marketplace:
also check comment on 4chan-x captcha about AGPL
