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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t seem accurate. Isn’t AGPL viral across RPC boundaries requiring open sourcing not just the service but all supporting code for that service?

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No it's not. From a practical standpoint, I'm not even sure how that could work. You would have to require all browsers to be open source AGPL in order to load a web page served by it. By way of analogy it seems the equivalent of requiring the mouse and keyboard firmware to be licensed the same as the operating system.

A real life example is Instructure, which makes Canvas (which is agpl) but has other proprietary services that interact heavily with it. It's never been a problem

1: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

> require all browsers to be open source AGPL in order to load a web page served by it

Don't be silly: a web server is not distributing a web browser, and thus when you visit news.ycombinator.com, they don't have influence over whether you do that via netcat, curl, or Awesome AGPL Browser 1.0

If, however, they used https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/tricot to serve the http request, then AIUI the AGPL entitles you, as a "13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License. (https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0)", to ask for the source code of tricot and potentially any systems that it subsequently interacts with

I'm certain I'm going to regret posting this, given how hot-button the AGPL is in every one of these threads

Instructure doesn't need to comply with AGPL obligations because it owns the product. It isn't licensing it to itself under the AGPL.

As far as I know, this isn't true. Some AGPL users claim that it is a requirement of the AGPL, but I am also unaware of any litigation that substantiates that reading of the license.

Can you cite cases that have established this as fact?

I would suspect no one wants to invest the legal team or time to be the "trailblazer" court case to find out whether your theory or the common interpretation is correct. The "just ban AGPL" stance is by far the safer route since it's not like there are no sane replacements for AGPL stuff

IANAL, and thus far my life is worse for any interaction with the legal system

It totally is safer, and I tend to agree with it in a business context. But the license itself doesn't seem to indicate that any kind of "RPC" is thus encumbered.

When MongoDB was under the AGPL, your application wasn't under the AGPL if you connected to it and asked it to do queries.

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