偷了点开源代码的 CSS，作者发邮件来要诉诸法律

咨询了一下 plausible CEO,他的回复:

No worries, thanks for getting back to me and working with me on this. You didn't hurt us, there's no hard feelings. I think Hypercable is a cool project demonstrating some interesting tech :) We use AGPL to protect us from large corproations but if our code gets relicensed by somebody else under Apache, then we lose the protections. I hope you understand.

Yes, the AGPL license is designed to be viral in this sense. If any AGPL code is used in a project, the whole project must be open sourced under the AGPL license. It's much more strict than MIT/Apache.

This is what protects us from large corporations, for example Google has a policy to never use AGPL licensed code in their projects because it would force them to open-source their projects.

> Once I have removed the references to AGPL v3, can I then change my project to another open source protocol, such as Apache v2 or MIT?

Yes. For now you can change the project over to AGPL by just pushing a new license to the repo. Once you feel like your product is unique enough, doesn't look like Plausible, and doesn't use any of our code, you can change back to MIT/Apache. But when changing from AGPL to MIT/Apache, you need the permission of all the collaborators of the project.

So, if during the time it's AGPL you accept any PRs or contributions, the contributors become copyright owners along with you and their written permission is required to change the license back.

You can bypass this by not accepting any contributions while it's AGPL, or accepting contributions only with a Contributor License Agreement that signs the copyright of the contribution itself over to you. That way you remain the sole copyright owner and are free to change the license without anyone's permission.

I hope this clarifies things a bit. We believe in using AGPL and recommend it, especially if you want to make money with your project. But you are the boss of your own project :)