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Comment by packetlost | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many of those are violating the AGPL license

Are you implying that merely using Minio is enough to force people to provide sources of their own services? If so, you need to be disabused of this misconception.

To be violating the AGPL License, someone would have to be providing a customized version of Minio to end users and not providing the source.

This might be a bit pedantic, but isn't it not necessarily that they provide a modified minio to users, but rather (or additionally) they are running a service that uses a modified minio under the hood?

No. The AGPL only consider distribution if the modified service is directly accessible to the users.

If someone makes modifications to Minio but the modifications are only for their internal services - or even if those accessing this Modified-Minio are internal to them - then it does not count as software distribution and therefore they can keep the source private without needing to provide their code modifications.

To take a few examples:

- if I use Minio to store data for my application and I make some improvements (e.g: SSO login for the console for back-office users), it won't count as distribution.

- If I have a set of services that use object storage running on my Minio cluster, and I add torrent-gateway capability to this cluster to make my applications able to find the data by content addressing, it won't count as network distribution and I do not need to share the source.

- If I start offering S3-compatible services to end users based on Minio, and if I start offering to people the ability to download files via a torrent gateway, I need to provide the source of my changes.

- If I make changes on the minio console to allow, e.g, a sleek file browsing UI with search, I need to provide the source with all my changes if this is acessible by the users.

Yes. I like to think of the AGPL as modifying the distribution part of the GPL to include direct network access by users. The "viral" part is the same between the two and is still linking code into a single program. AGPL libraries aren't very common, so it doesn't come up often.

Wow I had no idea that was the case, thanks for the detailed examples!

I think technically they also have to provide the source if they don't modify it. But that could probably just be having a link to the GitHub repo.

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