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Re: Licence question: using AGPL and Odoo proprietary modules on the same server

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Re: Licence question: using AGPL and Odoo proprietary modules on the same server

by
MoaHub, Graeme Gellatly
- 13/09/2025 23:15:17
One last thing. IMO, throw away any ideas of dual licensing. That is the worst of all the discussion here. For 1 OCA, cannot do it imo, but for 2, Bradley Kuhn has spent the last 10 years chastising the relicense industry and how it is leading free software licensing to even more restrictive copyleft just to protect themselves from these unscrupulous actors hiding behind CLAs to defy authors wishes. And it is hard to disagree with him on this.

Le dim. 14 sept. 2025, 09:05, Graeme Gellatly <graeme@moahub.nz> a écrit :
Sorry on that point. Of course, whatever the original author decides.  There is only 3 realistic choices anyway.

For me it is nearly always AGPL. I was not advocating OCA relicense to AGPL by any stretch, just encouraging its use and not to throw it away over some vendor FUD.

Le dim. 14 sept. 2025, 08:37, Joël Grand-Guillaume <notifications@odoo-community.org> a écrit :
Dear community,


I strongly agree with Maxine here. The OCA accept any OSI compliant licences and since the begining it has always left the choice to the contributors among available ones.

I invite you to read our FAQ under chapter licences & CLA: https://odoo-community.org/resources/faq

It explains what's needed. If you feel there is something not clear enough or missing, please write your proposal to: support AT odoo-community.org

Looking forward to meeting you in person at the OCA days, a good place to discuss it if you feel the need for it.

Best regards,

Joël 





Le sam. 13 sept. 2025, 22:21, Maxime Chambreuil <notifications@odoo-community.org> a écrit :
Hello,

Since everybody is giving its opinion, here is mine.

I think the license the contributor decides to put in the modules he is contributing to the OCA is his choice and should not be judged. We are a community, not a team or company. We don't necessarily share the same objectives and we don't necessarily aim for the same impact or result when contributing.

The only thing the OCA should do on this topic is educate so contributors make the right choice reflecting their values in complete awareness of the pros and cons. A page or blog post on the oca website comparing the different licenses, with pros and cons, with correct/incorrect legal/illegal behavior.

My 2 cents on the license. More to come on the contributions in the other thread later.

Cheers
--
Maxime Chambreuil
Desde mi móvil
From: Raphaël Valyi <notifications@odoo-community.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2025 6:36:58 AM
To: Contributors <contributors@odoo-community.org>
Subject: Re: Licence question: using AGPL and Odoo proprietary modules on the same server
 
Eventually we could create a simple OCA tutorial that would give an example use case where a company needs customizations that depend both on OCA AGPL and LGPL modules and need to protect some IP. We could give a few guidelines how to split the codebase between AGPL and LGPL derivatives.

Obviously there would always be a grey area where people would carefully craft glue modules to action OCA AGPL code without explicitly depending on it.

But eventually we could still cover the most obvious cases. This could help to:

- limit the FUD about AGPL
- incentivate more actors to publish what should be published

Would it be risky for the OCA to publish such guidelines if a court finally interpret things differently? Should we officially cover the EE case as well?


Finally about AGPL enforcement in general: one thing is the AGPL be violated by some final users. Just like piracy in general, it's hard to avoid indeed.

But at least the AGPL should ideally protect us against massive violation by big SaaS players (because of the legal risks). Without such protection, a big actor (Odoo SA themselves?) would easily put all OCA modules authors out of business by creating superior private derivatives without any attribution, much like some open source editors complained GAFAM like companies created unfriendly forks of their products.

Notice however that if the OCA starts selling double license exceptions, we will not even be sure we could name and shame or even sue some company who is obviously extending an OCA module without publishing it back. So I think it would just incentivate piracy, not a net positive for me...



On Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 8:47 AM Frederik Kramer <notifications@odoo-community.org> wrote:
Hi Greame,

there is amble debate on when an AGPL licenced software is actually made 
publicly available. To cases where it is pretty clear (to me and most 
people that i know do academic research on the matter):

1.) Your company is actually consisting of more then one legal entities 
collaborating on the same system (e.g. holding structure)

2.) If you use E-Commerce ar any means of direct user acces (like portal 
functions)

3.) If you let externals to your company access to the software (even 
with a VPN), e.g. freelancer use cases, suppliers, customers

Furthermore as soon as you modify anything you implicitely agree to the 
license liabilities

See 
https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1hh25a0/agpl_for_software_hosted_internally/ 
for a little bit of debate on the matter

Best Frederik

Am 13.09.25 um 13:02 schrieb Graeme Gellatly:




>




> The simplest way is to just not accept the license and not propagate 




> the AGPL licensed work. As long as you are using it unmodified, there 




> is no requirement to accept. Clause 9 is quite clear. 




> Conveyance/propagation as a combined work is easily avoided.





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