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Comment by intheleantime | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a misunderstanding of the license(s) here:

"But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you"

Neither GPL nor AGPL require you to submit anything back (or charges you) for changes made to your system for your own usage. Even if it is within a company. It is about preventing distributing derivates to the public under closed source licenses.

You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license.

There is no baiting here.

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Have you actually read the Affero license?

From section 13: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software."

Your statement is incorrect: "You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license."

Even *HOSTING* a private instance puts you under Affero. Even if the instance isn't public, if you so much as have a contractor remotely accessing an internal deployment of a customized Affero-licensed software then they can ask for this customization.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

"You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization " -- add to that that the organization should have access to the source code, yes. That doesn't mean that you need to publish the code outside of your organization.

" Even if the instance isn't public, if you so much as have a contractor remotely accessing " -- Correct, now you are distributing the software to the "public" external to your own needs.

"interacting with it remotely through a computer network" isn't "distributing", it's hosting. Companies providing software under Affero licenses love to play with words. That's fine. It remains a bad license for users. I choose not to use any software licensed under its terms.

Dislike the Affero for being onerous too, however:

How do you run the code on your local computer if the code was not distributed to you?

It is similar as the old days of having to distribute to you the compiled code for you to install on your local computer.

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