Why the Affero License?

At Neon Law, we believe in the power of open-source to transform the legal industry. Our mission is to improve access to justice, and a key part of that is building technology that makes legal services faster, smarter, and more affordable.

To achieve this, we need:

• ✅ A rapid pace of innovation—so we can continuously improve our tools
• ✅ A legal framework that protects our contributions—so our work isn’t exploited
• ✅ A way to keep quality high—so our software remains trustworthy

That’s why we license our software under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

🤔 Why the Affero License?

The AGPL allows us to:

• ✔ Share our work with the world while ensuring that improvements remain open-source
• ✔ Protect against corporate free-riding, where companies take open-source projects without contributing back
• ✔ Encourage rapid iteration and collaboration—so we can build better tools faster

By using AGPL, we foster an ecosystem where legal tech innovation is community-driven, not just controlled by a few large companies.

🔍 How AGPL Supports Our Mission

We are committed to doing everything we can to improve access to justice, and that means making legal processes faster, more efficient, and more affordable.

🚀 Speeding Up Innovation

The AGPL ensures that our software remains open without getting exploited by corporations that would slow down progress.

• If a company modifies our software and offers it as a service, AGPL requires them to share those changes back.
• This means that instead of legal technology stagnating in walled gardens, improvements flow back to the community, allowing us to iterate faster.

When legal tools evolve rapidly, they become cheaper, more powerful, and more widely available, which directly improves access to justice.

✅ Keeping Quality High with Open-Source Testing

Open-source isn’t just about access—it’s also about building reliable, well-tested software.

We take testing seriously, and AGPL allows us to take advantage of free, open-source tools like GitHub Actions to:

• 🛠 Run automated tests on every change—so we catch bugs before they affect users
• 🔄 Continuously integrate and deploy updates—ensuring that new features are stable and reliable
• 💡 Use community-driven tools for security and performance monitoring—so our software remains robust

These open-source testing workflows allow us to maintain a high-quality codebase while keeping our costs low, which in turn helps us focus on making legal services more accessible.

❌ Why Not Apache-2 or MIT?

While permissive licenses like Apache-2 and MIT make it easy for others to use our code, they also allow companies to take our work, close-source it, and profit without giving back.

For example, Amazon AWS copied Elasticsearch, commercialized it, and contributed nothing back. This led to a major shift in open-source licensing, with many companies switching to stronger copyleft licenses like AGPL.

At Neon Law, we want to ensure that our innovations remain open-source and community-driven, not locked behind corporate paywalls.

🎯 The Bottom Line

At Neon Law, we use AGPL because we believe in:

• ✔ Open, transparent legal technology—so justice is accessible to more people
• ✔ Fair contribution—no free-riding on community efforts
• ✔ Protecting our innovations while still sharing knowledge
• ✔ Accelerating innovation by ensuring improvements are shared

By choosing AGPL, we ensure that our technology remains open-source, high-quality, and community-driven—helping us build a faster, fairer, and more accessible legal system.

📩 Want to collaborate or learn more? Contact us at foundation@neonlaw.com.