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by josephcsible·5y ago·view on hn ↗
> The problem with using a permissive license such as Apache is, anyone can fork the project exclusively under xGPLv3.

Why is this a problem? If a GPL fork becomes more popular, you can switch your own license to GPL too, and then take the changes back. The real risk of using a pushover license is that someone makes a proprietary fork, in which case you are locked out of their changes forever, which is the exact thing the GPL disallows.

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That's assuming the businesses using the Apache Licensed version are comfortable with the original developer moving to xGPL.

Also, the businesses need to be wary of other proprietary code they might have to now open source as an unintended side-effect of moving to xGPL.

What if you went with GPLv2 only as your license? It isn't AGPL-compatible, so nobody could release an AGPL fork, and then companies wouldn't have to worry about it unless they distributed your code to other people, rather than just using it themselves, with the former being way less common than the latter. And most companies are okay with GPLv2 since they use Linux.