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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

Seems reasonable, the restriction on installing AGPL stuff on your devices seems odd (how would that influence publicly deployed services?) but it mentions there's an approval process which makes it possible, so... Good enough?

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I'd guess it's for making really sure that AGPL code doesn't end up in a published service by accident.

Probably for making sure they won't give up work for free. Say you used an AGPL software that you had to make 10x times faster, being forced to giveaway something like that for Google is not good. At least they'd wanna have the option.

As a google employee I think by far the most likely outcome of that scenario (where a google engineer modifies a piece of OSS to make it significantly better) would be that engineer using a lightweight process to get permission to contribute to that project (if it’s not already white listed for contributions) and then sending the improvements to be merged upstream.

There are many, many open source contributors at google and there is an entire group of people staffed to work on open source, among their responsibilities is to make it easy for google engineers to contribute to open source projects (both in their spare time and also as part of their daily work).

Presumably the bigger fear is that some AGPL program gets linked into their monorepo and the entire multi-billion line codebase is considered a "derivative work"

What if you use some kind of Remote Desktop to access your own device? Then you'd violate the AGPL.

you wouldn't, as GPL/AGPL only requires distributing the code to the users, and only if you changed anything.

You would just have to offer yourself your own source code to comply. Unless you plan on suing yourself, you don't even have to comply in this trivial case at all.

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