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Comment by atomlib | Hacker News Reader

What's APGL? Anti Personnel Grenade Launchers?

Network GPL, like GPL but if any system in your network (think of a chain of micro services) uses an AGPL/AGPL-like dependency, then all of your services have to be open sourced too.

That's not true although it is easy to misunderstand AGPL in this way.

You only have to provide the source of derivative work, and only to users of your service.

So only the micro service using AGPL code.

If you use an AGPL database for example, you don't have to provide any source code unless you change the source code of the database. This idea was behind the business models of Rethink DB and Mongo DB.

Except AGPL doesn't have the linking exception from LGPL, so your entire application is covered.

A microservice doesn't get around it if it's tightly coupled. It would only be enough if your main application was not dependent on the AGPL microservice (e.g. you have another image processing microservice that provides perfect parity).

IANAL, but the source distribution requirement from network use only comes into play if the original AGPL work is modified. Section 13 of the AGPL seems to be the only part of the license that deals with remote network access, and it specifies modified versions. Everywhere else the discussion is around "convey", which in the definitions specifically excludes interaction over a network.

Yepp, see here for more details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113021

He's mocking the fact that the title says APGL instead of AGPL

Some days I wonder if my brain is just wired significantly differently than most people. These single letter shift typos rarely even register in my mind. Hell, my mind registers words with 2-3 letters off perfectly fine. What usually gets me is when sentence structure is significantly off, not this kind of stuff.

Same

I was not mocking it — I genuinely tried to google the term. Grenade launchers was all I could find.

I guess it's AGPL then.

Basically, if you use the software to expose a service, your service becomes subject to the same terms as if you were distributing the code behind it.

What if you don't own the service?

My description was a little too short and poorly worded. I meant if you implement the service using the agpl project, and only expose the API over the network, the source becomes subject to the same terms as if you had distributed the service binaries. So in this case whoever does own the service has the liability.

Yeah, I wouldn’t want any of them in content I was hosting for others either.

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