The 170 Words

The MIT licence is 170 words long. It fits on a business card. It says: do whatever you want with this code, keep the copyright notice. That is the entire obligation.^[5]

It does not say: share your modifications.
It does not say: if you build a service on this code, your users have any rights.
It does not say: if you train an AI model on this code, the author is informed.
It does not say: if Amazon takes this code and builds a billion-dollar managed service that competes with you, you have any recourse.

The GPL v3 is 5,600 words.^[6] It says all of those things, or versions of them.

The GPL requires that modifications to the code be shared under the same licence.
Every subsequent user inherits the freedom to use, study, modify, and distribute the software.

By design, the GPL licence that prevents the scenario every open-source developer fears: a well-funded company taking your work, improving it privately, and out-competing you with your own code.

The AGPL adds one more provision: if you run the code as a network service,^[7] your users must be offered the source. This closes the loophole that cloud computing created. The horrid loophole that lets Amazon run your GPL code as a web service without triggering the share-alike requirement, because technically no binary was "distributed."

Students learn about MIT in fifteen minutes. They learn about GPL almost never. They learn about AGPL never. The asymmetry is not pedagogical but structural.

The Curriculum Gap

No major computer science curriculum teaches comparative open-source licensing. Students learn to write code, version it in Git, test it, deploy it to the cloud, and choose a licence by clicking (usually) the first option on a dropdown menu populated by choosealicense.com.^[8]

They graduate likely having never read a licence. Never compared the implications of permissive versus copyleft.^[9] Never considered what happens when the weekend project they open-sourced under MIT gets incorporated into a product by a company with a hundred engineers and a legal team. Never understood that the 170 words they clicked through were a permanent, irrevocable gift of their work's legal protections.

The omission is not neutral. The companies that benefit most from permissive licensing (Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft) fund university computer science programs, sponsor hackathons, run fellowship programs, and donate tools to classrooms.^[10] Their open-source projects (React, TensorFlow, VS Code, PyTorch) all use permissive licences. The ecosystem they build normalizes MIT and Apache as the default. The students who emerge from that ecosystem carry the default with them.

The curriculum doesn't teach licensing because the companies that fund the curriculum benefit from the licence the students choose by default.

• Alexander Somma

What Salvatore Built, and What Amazon Took

Gustave Courbet, "The Stone Breakers" (1849). Destroyed 1945. The workers build the road. Someone else drives on it. Public domain.

Salvatore Sanfilippo wrote Redis in 2009. He released it under the BSD licence, which is permissive, like MIT, with essentially no restrictions on use.^[11] Redis became one of the most widely used databases in the world. By 2024, it powered caching, messaging, and session management for millions of applications.

Amazon built ElastiCache, a managed Redis service on AWS. Amazon did not write Redis. Amazon did not maintain Redis. Amazon took Sanfilippo's BSD-licensed code, deployed it on Amazon's infrastructure, charged Amazon's customers for access, and returned nothing to Sanfilippo or the Redis community.^[12] The BSD licence permitted this. That was the point of the licence. Sanfilippo had chosen it.

Redis Ltd. changed the licence in March 2024. New versions of Redis would ship under a dual licence that included the Server Side Public License (SSPL) – a licence specifically designed to prevent cloud providers from offering the software as a service without sharing their modifications.^[13]

The community fractured. The Linux Foundation forked the last BSD-licensed version as Valkey. Amazon backed the fork. Dawn Foster, director of data science at CHAOSS, found that the number of external contributors with five or more commits to Redis dropped to zero in the first six months after the relicensing.^[14]

Sanfilippo returned to Redis in December 2024. He openly favoured full open-source licensing. In May 2025, Redis added the AGPLv3 – the licence that would have prevented the entire crisis, had it been chosen in 2009.^[15]

The story took sixteen years. The lesson takes one sentence: the licence you choose on day one determines who profits on day ten thousand.

The Pattern

Redis is not unique. The pattern has repeated with the mechanical regularity of a bug in production:

Elastic released Elasticsearch under Apache 2.0. Amazon forked it, built OpenSearch, and competed directly. Elastic switched to SSPL in 2021. The community split. Elastic returned to AGPL in 2024.^[16]

HashiCorp released Terraform under MPL (a weak copyleft). Cloud providers built managed Terraform services. HashiCorp switched to BSL (source-available, not open-source) in August 2023. The community forked to OpenTofu.^[17]

Every case follows the same arc: permissive licence → widespread adoption → cloud provider extraction → panic → restrictive relicensing → community fracture. Every case could have been prevented by choosing the AGPL from the start.

The Google Ban That Became a Religion

Google published an internal policy in 2010 prohibiting the use of AGPL-licensed software across the company.^[18] The reasoning was specific to Google's architecture: Google runs virtually everything as a network service, and Section 13 of the AGPL requires that anyone running AGPL code as a network service make the modified source available to users. For a company whose entire business depends on proprietary modifications to open-source infrastructure, this was an existential constraint.

Google also operates one of the largest monorepos in the world — a single repository containing billions of lines of code, where dependencies are shared and linked across projects. In a monorepo, the boundaries between "separate programs" blur. Introducing AGPL code into that environment risks copyleft obligations propagating across an unknowable number of internal services. Their ban was not just about network services, it was about the architecture of Google's entire codebase.

The AGPL ban was only rational for Google. Then the rest of the industry copied it.

Heather Meeker, a general partner at OSS Capital and the author of Open Source for Business, has spent two decades correcting the resulting confusion. "The single most significant misconception about copyleft licenses," Meeker wrote, "is caused by the use of the word 'viral.'"^[19] The metaphor implies that copyleft spreads through contact, infecting any code that touches it. There is no legal mechanism by which this occurs. The Free Software Foundation's GPL FAQ addresses it directly: "Pipes, sockets, and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs."^[20] Separate programs communicating over standard interfaces do not form a combined work. The copyleft does not cross the pipe.

The ban was rational for one company. Then it became gospel for an entire industry, because reading a policy is easier than reading a licence. The result is a generation of developers who avoid the one licence designed to protect them, based on a prohibition they do not understand, created by a company whose interests are the opposite of theirs.

One company banned AGPL because it worked. The industry banned AGPL because that company did. Developers avoid AGPL because the industry does. Nobody in the chain read the licence.

The Copyleft Comeback

Joseph Wright of Derby, "A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery" (c. 1766). Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Understanding the mechanism changes everything. Public domain.

Now, something is shifting.

RedMonk's 2026 State of Open Source Licensing report found that permissive licensing declined from 82 percent to 73 percent between 2022 and 2025 – the first reversal in over a decade.^[21] Elastic returned to AGPL. Redis adopted AGPL. Nextcloud invested 250 million euros in sovereignty infrastructure, all AGPL-licensed.^[22]

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, published a blog post in July 2025 explaining why he had changed his mind about software licensing. After years of advocating for permissive licences, Buterin now favoured copyleft. His reasoning was mathematical: "Fundamentally, if you assume economies of scale, then by simple mathematical reasoning, nonzero openness is the only way that the world does not eventually converge to one actor controlling everything."^[23]

The AI dimension accelerates the urgency. MIT-licensed code can be used to train language models without attribution, without sharing the training data, and without releasing the model weights.^[24] The original authors receive no notification. A study published on arXiv found that top-performing code-generation LLMs produce output that is "strikingly similar" to existing open-source code a portion of the time.^[25] The 170 words of the MIT licence have become the legal mechanism by which open-source developers unknowingly subsidize proprietary AI models.

One Lecture

The fix is not complicated. It is a one lecture discussion, with one comparison table. One discussion of what happens when Amazon or Google take your code.

The table looks like this:

All three licences permit commercial use. All three permit modification. All three permit distribution. The difference is what happens to the modifications: MIT says nothing. GPL says share them if you distribute. AGPL says share them if you distribute OR serve them over a network.^[26]

Sage.is AI-UI uses AGPL-3.^[27] So does Mastodon. So does Nextcloud. So does Matrix. So does Grafana. Our choice is deliberate: if anyone takes the code, modifies it, and runs it as a service, the modifications come back to our community. The licence ensures that the commons stays common.

The lecture shouldn't take more than forty-five minutes. The table fits on one slide. The Redis case study takes five minutes to review. The choosealicense.com origin story takes maybe two. The result: a developer who understands that choosing a licence is not a formality. It is a decision about who profits from their work.

Sadly, no university currently teaches this lecture, although every university should.

OUR ALTERNATIVE 170 Words

The MIT licence is 170 words. It fits on a business card. It gives everything away.

The AGPL is 14,000 words. Almost nobody reads it. So here it is in our 170 words for you to read, share, and use:^[28]

Copyright (c) [year] [copyright holders]

Permission is hereby granted to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files, to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies of the software, including for commercial purposes, subject to the following conditions:

If you distribute this software, or any work derived from it, you must release the complete source code under this same licence. If you modify this software and users interact with your version over a network — as a web application, an API, or a hosted service — you must offer those users the complete source code of your version, at no charge. All copies must include this copyright notice and this licence. You may not impose additional licence restrictions beyond this.

These permissions are irrevocable and royalty-free for the term of copyright. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. This is a plain-language summary. The full legal text of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, governs all use for you.

Same rights. Same freedoms. Same business card. The only difference: when someone takes your code and builds a service on it, the improvements come back. That is the entire addition. That is what the AGPL's full 14,000 words protect, and what our 170 words make clear and fair.

Disclosure

This article examines the structural factors behind the dominance of permissive open-source licensing and the educational gap that perpetuates it. The author uses AGPL-3 for Sage.is AI-UI. Heather Meeker is quoted from published works. Tom Preston-Werner is quoted from a public keynote. Vitalik Buterin is quoted from a public blog post. None were interviewed for this article.

The views expressed are those of the editorial board. Sage.is AI-UI is a product of Startr LLC and uses AGPL-3 licensing. Tom Preston-Werner, Heather Meeker, and Vitalik Buterin are quoted from public speeches and published works; none were interviewed for this article. Full disclosure and transparency is a feature, not a bug.