The AGPL license

The Yahoo Open Source Program Office (OSPO) provides services to help engineers at Yahoo succeed with open source. If you are interested to learn more about open source, we are here to help. To get an overview of our program, vist the OSPO Welcome Page intranet page, chat with us on our internal Slack channel (#opensource), or send an email to ospo@.

This page highlights our policy with respect to the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). It’s a special license worth special treatment.

Assume by default, code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) should not be used at Yahoo. We have encountered a small number of exceptional cases where we have approved the use of AGPL licensed code. To get an exception, first contact the OSPO and we will work with you and the relevant teams to determine if your use case warrants an exception.
Many AGPL licensed products offer commercially licensed alternatives. In fact many commercial products use the AGPL licensing to draw users to their commercial options. We suggest you view AGPL licensed code as the bait to a commercial option and then consider the merits of the commercial option. Getting commercially licensed code requires you work with our software procurement teams.
Some software products that used AGPL to drive commercial licensing are re-licensing their products to use “source-available” licenses that are not actually open source licenses (meaning: they do not comply with the Open Source Definition). To use any of these, open a ticket with the OSPO and we’ll initiate a review for you. We have approved some of these, but each case differs.

We ask that you not check in AGPL-licensed code to our repositories and not include a dependency on AGPL licensed code in your products. For those cases where we have granted you an exception to use an AGPL code base, we’ll instruct you on how we want the code handled.

If you have any questions about this policy or about open source licenses, please contact the OSPO. We’re here to help and will gladly explain the rationale behind this and other policies.