Glossary
AGPL
A strong-copyleft license that extends GPL's source-distribution requirement to network-served software, the strongest open-source license to deter proprietary SaaS deployment.
The “if you run this as a network service, you must publish source” license. AGPL closes the GPL loophole where a company could fork GPL software, modify it, and serve it as SaaS without ever distributing binaries (and thus without triggering GPL’s source-publication requirement). AGPL triggers on network use as well as distribution.
For AI projects, AGPL is the license to pick when the goal is to prevent hyperscalers from forking your work into a proprietary hosted product. Several open-source database, search, and infrastructure projects (MongoDB pre-SSPL, Elasticsearch pre-Elastic-License, Grafana, Bagel-DB) have moved to AGPL for exactly this reason.
In the LLM ecosystem AGPL appears on some retrieval and orchestration projects but is rare on model weights themselves. The model-license contest has been Apache 2.0governanceA permissive open-source license used by most open-weight model releases (Llama from 4 onward partial, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, Falcon), allowing commercial use without acceptable-use restrictions. Open full entry -vs-custom-RAIL not Apache 2.0governanceA permissive open-source license used by most open-weight model releases (Llama from 4 onward partial, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, Falcon), allowing commercial use without acceptable-use restrictions. Open full entry -vs-AGPL, since model weights are usually consumed as inputs to a wrapping service rather than redistributed directly.