When we open sourced Neural Inverse Cloud, the easiest choice would have been MIT.
Most developers like MIT. It's short, permissive, and widely adopted. If you've released an open-source project before, MIT is probably the first license you considered.
We didn't choose it.
We chose AGPL.
Not because we dislike permissive open source. Not because we want to restrict users. We chose it because infrastructure software plays by different rules.
The Infrastructure Problem
MIT works incredibly well for libraries.
You publish code, developers use it, and occasionally improvements flow back into the project. Nobody is forced to contribute, but community norms often make it happen anyway.
Infrastructure software is different.
Cloud IDEs, databases, developer platforms, deployment systems, and backend services can be monetized without ever distributing the source code.
A company can:
- Fork your project
- Add proprietary features
- Launch a hosted version
- Build a competitive advantage on top of community work
- Never contribute anything back
The original project does all the R&D.
The fork captures the value.
We've seen this pattern repeatedly across open-source infrastructure over the last decade.
Why AGPL Exists
AGPL closes a loophole that traditional open-source licenses leave open.
With GPL, if you distribute modified software, you must publish your changes.
But what if you never distribute the software?
What if you simply run it as a hosted service?
That's where AGPL comes in.
If you modify AGPL software and provide it to users over a network, you must also provide the source code for those modifications.
That applies to everyone.
Including us.
If we improve Neural Inverse Cloud, those improvements stay open.
If someone else builds a SaaS business on top of it, their modifications stay open too.
Why This Matters for Users
We wanted users to have guarantees.
With AGPL:
- You can self-host the latest version
- Community improvements remain accessible
- No company can create a permanently closed fork
- You always have an escape hatch
The software stays genuinely open.
With MIT, there's nothing stopping a company from taking the code tomorrow, adding proprietary features, and creating a version the community can never access.
That's not necessarily wrong.
It's simply not the ecosystem we wanted to build.
The Enterprise Trade-Off
Let's be honest.
AGPL scares some enterprises.
Many legal departments have blanket policies against copyleft licenses. Some procurement teams won't even evaluate AGPL software.
We're okay with that.
Neural Inverse wasn't designed around enterprise procurement checklists.
It was designed for developers who want control over their tools and the freedom to self-host them.
If that means slower enterprise adoption, we're willing to make that trade.
Competing With Ourselves
Our business model is intentionally simple.
The source code is open.
Self-hosting is free.
If you don't want to manage infrastructure, we'll run it for you.
We charge for operations, reliability, infrastructure, scaling, and maintenance—not for access to the code itself.
That means we compete with our own self-hosted version.
And we think that's healthy.
Open source should give users real choices.
Why More Infrastructure Projects Should Consider AGPL
AGPL isn't the right answer for every project.
For libraries, SDKs, and developer tools, MIT often makes perfect sense.
But for infrastructure software, AGPL creates something valuable:
Alignment.
The incentives of the company, the community, and the users stay closer together.
If someone improves the platform, everyone benefits.
That's the kind of ecosystem we want to build around Neural Inverse Cloud.
Open source should be more than source code you can read.
It should be software that stays open—even when it's successful.
Neural Inverse Cloud
- Self-hosted: github.com/NeuralInverse/cloud
- Managed Cloud: https://cloud.neuralinverse.com
- Free credit: $1.22 (no card required)
What license would you choose for an open-source cloud platform: MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL, or AGPL? I'd love to hear the arguments from both sides.
