AGPLv3 makes it nearly impossible to use the library

[thred]

Hi,

Recently I was searching for a simple way to add autocomplete to a textarea in some proprietary maintenance application of my company. The application will be used internally by a handful of users. smart-area seems to perfectly fit my needs, but unfortunately it's a JavaScript library licensed under (A)GPLv3.

Using GPLv3 for JavaScript libraries is an ongoing discussion and it's generally considered a bad idea to use it for JS-libs [citation needed].

My question is: was it intentionally to use exactly this license, or would LGPLv3 be a better choice?

Another thing is, that the license definition in the package.json is wrong. It should be "AGPL-3.0" not "AGPL-V3" (see https://spdx.org/licenses/). Webjars refuses to generate a .jar from the lib because of this.

References for the [citation needed]:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1239470/restrictions-of-gpl-on-javascript-libraries
http://greendrake.info/#nfy0
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
...

Thanks for considering,

Manfred

[mindscratch]

@aurbano any thoughts on this? Have you considered changing it? or allowing someone else to take over as maintainer?

[aurbano]

I'll release a version under MIT