That’s misleading. While copyright owners aren’t bound by their own license, AGPL Section 13 requires that when they run AGPL software as a network service, they must make the complete source available to users.
The AGPL was specifically designed to close the “SaaS loophole.” Being the copyright owner doesn’t exempt you from AGPL’s network service requirements if you’re distributing under that license.
@Goldflag,
Thanks for clarifying! Good to hear everything’s in the repo and that it’s truly AGPL compliant.
Since as self-hosters we already carry the burden of maintenance, updates, security, and infrastructure costs that cloud users don’t, would you consider documenting how to enable the cloud features in self-hosted setups?
I see the docs cover basic environment variables, but not for Pages View, Web Vitals, or VPN/ASN tracking. Even if some features need extra config (SMTP, OAuth creds), having that documented would help those of us willing to do the work.
That would truly differentiate Rybbit from Plausible/Fathom—not just code parity, but empowering self-hosters with full feature access.
@Goldflag
I appreciate the intent behind Rybbit, but I have to respectfully disagree with the “only very slightly so” characterization. Looking at your official comparison table, the self-hosted version is missing:
That’s 7 significant features—which seems more than “very slightly” different.
More importantly, this raises AGPL compliance questions. Under AGPLv3 Section 13, if users interact with modified AGPL software over a network (your cloud version), you’re required to make the complete corresponding source code available to those users. If these cloud-only features are integrated into the same AGPL-licensed codebase, withholding them from the public repo while running them as a network service appears to conflict with the license terms.
There are really only two compliant scenarios here:
If it’s neither—if these are AGPL-covered features running in your cloud service but withheld from the repo—that’s exactly the “loophole” the AGPL was designed to close. The irony is that you criticized Plausible and Fathom for having “much inferior self-hosted versions,” yet this appears to be a similar approach.
Could you clarify the licensing status of these cloud-only features? Are they in the public repo but disabled by default, or are they proprietary additions that don’t derive from the AGPL codebase?
Never had issues setting up Nextcloud with Podman, but on 3 occasions I tried to integrate OnlyOffice with it and couldn’t get it to work.
In the end, I simply dropped both of them because the whole idea was to have an editor with it. I decided to go with the approach where I use Syncthing to sync my documents folder to multiple machines and my phone, and edit using LibreOffice on each machine.
I wouldn’t say it’s only for the extra paranoid, but rather for everyone.
After reading the whole discussion, it’s clear that the repo transfer was handled in an extremely unorthodox way, at least by usual standards for repo handovers that I’m familiar/experienced with.
Communication from Catfriend1 was absolutely nonexistent, and there was only minimal info from the person who took over using a GitHub account created just two days ago.
Trust is something that must be earned, not given to someone you’ve never seen or heard of before.
Didn’t get to contributing to Tempus yet, but since I use it & like the layout approach, I forked Feishin and made it more Tempus-like. Decades, starred albums and tracks sections etc. Have a look if you like it. Linux only since it’s my primary driver.
That’s inacurrate. Licensing representation matters. If the cloud service is genuinely presented as AGPL-licensed, Section 13 obligations apply regardless of copyright ownership. However, copyright owners remain free to maintain truly separate proprietary versions under dual licensing.