关于开源协议优化 | Plan to change lisence

[MaojiaSheng]

Dear Community Partners,

Greetings. Since its open-source launch, the OpenViking project has garnered strong attention from the community and received voluntary contributions from developers worldwide, for which we feel deeply honored. The Volcano Engine Viking team will continue to increase investment in the OpenViking project, delivering a more mature, reliable, and efficient vector database product to the open-source community and fostering the prosperity of the AI Agent ecosystem.

As OpenViking is poised to reach 20k GitHub Stars, we aim to engage in in-depth discussions with the community to ensure the project’s long-term sustainable development. The Viking team will launch a managed public cloud version of OpenViking, enabling developers to deploy and use OpenViking at a lower cost and build more sophisticated AI applications. Meanwhile, as a commercial entity, we seek to balance community advancement with sustainable commercial development, providing reliable technical support and services to the community. On this basis, we also welcome other commercial partners and service providers to offer OpenViking-related support and services to their customers.

However, the current Apache-2.0 license used by OpenViking imposes weak restrictions on commercial service providers. To safeguard the community’s interests and sustain a thriving ecosystem, we wish to require open-sourcing for high-value commercial derivative works built on OpenViking. We therefore plan to change OpenViking’s open-source license to AGPLv3.
The AGPLv3 license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html) is widely recognized as one of the leading open-source licenses for the cloud computing era. Its core principle is “open-source and free; closed-source requires a commercial license”, using economic incentives to promote open-sourcing of derivative works. Prominent projects such as Redis, Elasticsearch, and Grafana have adopted this license, and the success of numerous AGPLv3 projects demonstrates its positive impact on community growth.

For community developers and contributors: We are committed to protecting your rights, and your code and its derivatives will be covered by stronger open-source guarantees. For OpenViking users: The Volcano Engine Viking team will continue to balance the interests of the open-source community and commercial operations. Commercial revenue generated from OpenViking will be reinvested into the community with more engineering and support resources.

In summary, OpenViking plans to switch to the AGPLv3 license starting with version 0.3. If you have questions or feedback, please join the discussion under this thread.

Volcano Engine Viking Team

尊敬的社区伙伴：

您好。OpenViking 项目开源后受到社区的高度关注，并得到了全球社区开发者的无偿贡献，我们深感荣幸。火山引擎 Viking 团队将持续加大对 OpenViking 项目的投入，为开源社区提供更为成熟、可靠且高效的上下文数据库产品，推动 AI Agent 生态的繁荣发展。

在 OpenViking 项目 Star 即将突破 20k 这一节点，我们期望与社区进行深入探讨，思索项目的长期可持续发展。Viking 团队将推出 OpenViking 的公有云托管版本，以便开发者以更低成本部署和使用 OpenViking，进而开发更复杂的 AI 应用。同时，作为商业公司，我们希望在推动社区发展的同时兼顾商业化发展，为社区提供可靠的技术支持与服务。在此基础上，我们也欢迎其他商业伙伴或服务商为其客户提供 OpenViking 的相关支持与服务。

然而，OpenViking 项目当前采用的 Apache - 2.0 协议对商业服务商的约束性较弱。为持续维护社区利益，保障社区生态的繁荣发展，我们希望基于 OpenViking 的高价值商业化二次开发实现开源。因此，我们考虑将 OpenViking 的开源协议修改为 AGPLv3 协议。

AGPLv3 协议（ https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html ）是社区公认的云计算时代主流开源协议之一，其核心原则为“开源免费、闭源需授权”，通过经济杠杆推动二次开发的开源。当前，Redis、ElasticSearch、Grafana 等知名项目均采用该协议，大量采用 AGPLv3 协议的项目的成功证明了该协议对于社区繁荣发展具备积极价值。

若您是社区的开发者和贡献者，我们将致力于保护您的权益，您的代码及其衍生版本将获得更完善的开源承诺；若您是 OpenViking 的使用者，火山引擎 Viking 团队将持续平衡开源社区与公司商业利益，我们通过 OpenViking 获得的商业化收入将有助于为开源社区投入更多人力支持。

综上所述，OpenViking 考虑从 0.3 版本开始切换至 AGPLv3 协议。若您对此有相关疑问，可在本话题下与我们交流探讨。

火山引擎 Viking 团队

[zhoujh01]

有预期的时间吗？

[MaojiaSheng]

考虑在 4 月初，待社区无疑问后就可以了

[shamiao]

我认为通过更改许可证为AGPL来反制closed-source forks是一个好主意，但是这仅仅对于服务器部分有意义。

因为防范客户端部分的闭源，是显然没有任何意义的，反而会限制项目的推广。例如我想做一个专有软件，可以对接多种AI记忆后端，此时AGPL就会形成障碍。

当然整个项目保持AGPL是一个好主意，我希望的是项目能对除了服务端之外的代码，采用“AGPL/Apache任选其一”的许可证。这样可以让只需要采纳客户端代码的用户，有一个宽松的选项。（而OpenClaw之类的前后端整包用户，也可以简单的整体采用AGPL）

I think changing the license to AGPL to counter closed-source forks is a good idea, but this only makes sense for the server part.

Preventing the client component from becoming closed-source is obviously pointless; in fact, it would block the project’s wide adoption. For example, if I want to create a proprietary client which utilizes multiple AI memory backends, AGPL would become a trouble for me.

I support changing the whole project to AGPL. But what I’m hoping is that the project could provide an “AGPL/Apache, at your option” for any code other than the server part. This would provide a more permissive option for users who only need the client code. (And this license model can keep server+client usages like OpenClaw plugin to stay AGPL as a whole elegantly.)

[xlionjuan]

Look what Redis did, and what they end up with.