[akrauss]

I can see this being very useful for many admin interfaces where some basic data must be managed by domain experts and UX and is not a priority. Many enterprise applications have such parts.

I wonder what the GPLv3 licensing means for such scenarios: Could people run Mathesar one microservice in an ensemble with proprietary services? Companies who don‘t want to open source their whole product might still be willing to upstream their fixes and improvements to the Mathesar component.

[kgodey]

Yep, Mathesar is GPLv3, not AGPL, so there’s no issue running it alongside proprietary services. Companies can absolutely use Mathesar as a standalone service in their stack without open-sourcing their other components. Another example of this is WordPress, which is also GPL, and has a thriving hosting ecosystem.

GPLv3 only applies if you modify and distribute Mathesar itself, it doesn’t extend to services that simply interact with it. If a company makes changes to Mathesar and distributes that modified version, then those modifications would need to be open-sourced under GPLv3. But using Mathesar as a microservice in an enterprise stack? No problem.

We’d love to see companies upstream fixes and improvements, of course!

[red_trumpet]

Does AGPL have trouble running alongside proprietary services? I always thought AGPL means that if you host the software, you have to make any changes you did available to the users. So if you host it without changes, there is no problem?