Hacker News Reader

Comment by _msw_ | Hacker News Reader

Disclosure: I work for Amazon.

AWS never offered MongoDB as a managed service, or used any of their server software when it was licensed under APLv3, or SSPLv1.

However, we have contributed patches to MongoDB even after their license change to improve its performance on Graviton processors. Because that's what's good for customers, and MongoDB is an important customer and partner.

AGPLv3 gives all the permissions needed to offer software as a manged service, just like every other FOSS license does. Unfortunately, in my personal opinion, the license has been co-opted by companies that do not care about Software Freedom, and rather hope that companies fear the license so they choose an alternative commercial agreement [1]. I don't think that's good for the community.

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

View on HN

Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service?

Does Amazon contribute funding back to the software projects they offer as a service?

Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?

> Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service?

Each use of AGPLv3 licensed software has to be reviewed to ensure that the obligations of the license can be and will be met (and also screen for cases where it is known that the vendor of software does not prefer a company like Amazon import the software under a FOSS license). Today we use AGPLv3 licensed software internally, and include AGPLv3 licensed software in Amazon Linux (Ghostscript, in particular).

> Does Amazon contribute funding back to the software projects they offer as a service?

Yes, in varying ways. For example, it is not easy to provide "funding" for something like Apache Kafka. You need to have people working on the upstream.

> Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?

Yes, but not all changes are appropriate for upstream.

Thanks for the answers, very interesting.

>> Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?

> Yes, but not all changes are appropriate for upstream.

But the (modified) source is available to consumers of the service either way, under the AGPL?

> But the (modified) source is available to consumers of the service either way, under the AGPL?

If Amazon made an AGPLv3 licensed program available to others over a network, it would have an obligation to provide to anyone that has access to that program the complete corresponding source.

Today, there aren't any services from Amazon that offer AGPLv3 licensed programs as a service. An example that may come to someone's mind is Grafana, but there is a partnership there, and AGPLv3 is not the binding license in that case.

In my personal opinion, AGPLv3 compliance is not difficult, so long as the licensor of the software is committed to community-oriented copyleft enforcement principles [1].

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

I think it would be awesome if Amazon could offer hosted AGPLv3 software, plus revenue share with the developers, code contributions to the original project and public forks containing non-upstreamable changes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com