I wrote a medium size program for chip design and released it under the #AGPL. In this field the world is moving towards cloud services.
Now a research group wants to contribute. Google promises to pay them - but only if I change the licence to something else. Google does not like the APGL. If I don't change the licence a group of students will rewrite the tool. (Likely under a permissive licence.)
What would you do?
@klaatu lctime is a command-line tools. That may not sound like a typical case for the AGPL. But I observe a growing trend towards cloud-based services for electronic design automation.
'Characterization' is very compute intense because it runs tons of circuit simulations. Therefore it is very interesting to wrap that into a service. That's why I chose the AGPL.
@klaatu It's a real scenario.
That's the repo: https://codeberg.org/librecell/lctime
(here it was originally, but I'm reorganizing the code base https://codeberg.org/tok/librecell)
'lctime' very specific to the design of digital integrated circuits. lctime does 'characterization'. This means simulating the signal propagation speeds in logic cells (inverters, AND gates, flip-flops and the like).