Licensing

[dotMorten]

Nice work on this project! I've been dabbling building the same thing, but since you've made it much further I'd love to help out. However is there a specific reason why you chose AGPL? It's a very restrictive license to work with, compared to Apache or MIT. It sadly would keep me away from using or contributing.

[jdomnitz]

It's a great question. The primary reason was taking a look at what happened to other great open source smart home libraries that used MIT licensing and then died off after commercial devices began using them without committing back bug fixes. Moves by some of the big libraries out there (ex:
https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/grafana-loki-tempo-relicensing-to-agplv3/) laid out a great use case for AGPL.

I would be open to migrating to LGPL if that would be a better fit. If that is still too restrictive, can you clarify which option you think would be best and why?

[dotMorten]

Interesting. I see the opposite happening: You never get the industry to adopt your technology with any of the GPL licenses, which completely rules out any chance what-so-ever of getting contributions from anyone with money behind them. Are there bad faith players out there? Sure. Are they all like that with none of them contributing back? No. I'm also not sure how that would kill an open source project. Those projects didn't die because someone used it.
As a rule of thumb I generally only contribute to (and use) MIT and Apache2.0 projects, to ensure I don't violate any licensing terms if any of my code was inspired by non-GPL code.

[jdomnitz]

Linux, Git, MySQL and several other major platforms continue to use GPL without any impact to commercial contributions. If the issue is use within proprietary products I would be happy to switch to LGPL but I'm still hesitant to switch to a non-copyleft license and deal with the fragmentation issues that causes. I'm not sure I understand your concern about mixed licenses though, you can contribute code licensed with MIT or Apache to a GPL project without any license violations.