Hosting is distribution - with Tivoization - alternatives to AGPL3

Question

If one is interested in the 'hosting is distribution' aspect of the license, but you don't want the anti-Tivoization, what are the alternatives to the GNU Affero General Public License?

The original Affero General Public License version 1 is still around. It's incompatible with GNU GPL licenses. But, in a broken way? What are the consequences of that?

If you only use non-GPL code or GPL code with library exception clauses, you can still distribute as .deb or AppImage, I suppose?

Edit: I'll clarify my situation. I wrote the MQTT server FlashMQ. It's currently AGPL3, but I'm looking to change it. The reason is that for its original intent, it's a server program. And if it doesn't have network-copyleft, I might as well give it the unlicense, because who cares about distributing binaries.

But, now it's also going to be use embedded in IoT devices and they have laws to follow. GPL3 rules simply don't work.

I have two cares:

• Any user interacting with FlashMQ needs to be able to see what they're interacting with.
• For anybody taking the project to host it; to quote Linus Torvalds with my addition: "I give you source code, you give me your (hosted) changes back, we're even".

Speaking of Torvalds, he said that the FSF lied to people when it comes to invalidating Tivoization, for the same reason mentioned in a comment below: people can fork the project and use the full AGPL3 and then I can't take back the changes.

Answer 1

If you have a license that is slightly too strict for your purposes, you can combine it with a license exception. For example, the LGPL-3.0 is such an exception for the GPL-3.0. The A/L/GPL-3.0 license family allows the license to be combined with additional permissions (see section 7).

If you want to permit Tivoization, you could have a lawyer draft up a suitable exception from the relevant A/GPL-3.0 section 6 clauses.

Of course you can also use the original Affero license – there's probably no legal problem here. However, do note that the Apache-2 license is incompatible with older GPL-family licenses due to conflicting patent clauses. Using old licenses also misses out on other improvements in the meanwhile, for example with clearer definitions, and better adaptation to non-US jurisdictions. Finally, consider that unusual licenses make it more difficult to other people to use, modify, and share the software in novel ways, which would typically be the entire point of publishing it as Open Source. AGPL-1.0-only is a dead end when it comes to license compatibility, though AGPL-1.0-or-later would at least allow downstream changes to use the more well understood AGPL-3.0 terms instead.

There are a couple of other network-copyleft licenses, though none are as popular with the AGPL-3.0. Blue Oak has a list of "network copyleft" and "maximal copyleft" licenses, though I think that list contains some licenses that aren't network copyleft, and some licenses that aren't Open Source.