Hacker News Reader

Comment by naebother | Hacker News Reader

> Besides the commit raising questions about Gab’s process for developing secure code, the social media site is also facing criticism for removing the commits from its website. Critics say the move violates terms of the Affero General Public License, which governs Gab’s reuse of Mastodon, an open source software package for hosting social networking platforms.

Lmao, that's not how AGPL works. Although, it would be pretty funny if a license explicitly required you to post all your Ls for public ridicule.

View on HN

> Lmao, that's not how AGPL works.

The GPL family, including the AGPL, defines source code that must be provided as “the preferred form for making changes”; if the form the distributor uses is a VCS repository with full history, publishing either static snapshots or a repository with an expurgated history could arguably be a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the licenses. The language of the licenses makes the requirement dependent on actual development practices, not fixed, and that's not an accident.

I'm guessing you're referring to the first sentence in section 1:

> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. "Object code" means any non-source form of a work.

I don't think that's referring to the method by which I make changes or manage those changes. It's simply trying to make it clear that source-code is something that should be in a form you can actually change, and not something obfuscated. e.g. minified, transpiled, object-code, etc. The second sentence gives the first more context.

The spirit of all GNU licenses is that the end-user should have the freedom and ability to understand or modify software that's *distributed* to them for themselves. It has nothing to do with having a full history of the source-code available. What does full history even mean? I'd like every auto-save to every LGPL licensed file, please.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com