The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) was chosen by MongoDB for its release on May 5, 2009, to preserve the concept of copyleft while addressing the shift from traditional distribution of software to cloud-based usage. The AGPL fixes a "loophole" in GPL v3 by requiring that modifications to the database source code be contributed back to the community, but it does not apply to applications using the database, which are licensed under an Apache license. The goal is to ensure that users contribute their modifications to the community, rather than keeping them proprietary.