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Comment by dabedee | Hacker News Reader

As mentionned by two other people in the comments, this is spreading false propaganda against AGPL which only serves the interest of internet-based companies that want to benefit from FOSS code without having to share their own creations[1]: "Google wants to be able to incorporate FOSS software into their products and sell it to users without the obligation to release their derivative works."

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html

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See my reply to one of the pre-existing comments [0]: it's not Google that is the primary source of these ideas about AGPL, it's the companies who chose AGPL with the intention of choosing a license that is completely and totally viral, even over network calls. Companies like iText [1] want their customers to believe that AGPL means that there's no way to use the free version without open-sourcing your entire software stack.

Whether or not that's true, it's reasonable for Google to warn against using an untested license that has vendors using it who specifically argue that it is completely and totally viral. Interpreting that caution as a psy-op is a bit far fetched.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37904285

[1] https://itextpdf.com/how-buy/AGPLv3-license

The way I see it, it looks like iText is simply lying on their page about at least some of the restrictions of AGPL.

I'm inclined to agree. And I'm more inclined to believe that they and companies like them are responsible for false narratives surrounding AGPL than I am to believe that it's a long con by the cloud providers to get more free work for their cloud services. Vendors of AGPL software have a much more concrete and proximate motivation for exaggerating the effects of AGPL than the cloud providers do.

Google could do something good and test the license. They have the resources to fight it out.

The fact that they won't use AGPL software isn't propaganda lol. They literally won't use it. You may disagree about whether that's good or bad for the ecosystem, but it's a fact that most serous internet-based companies (and what tech co isn't these days?) won't touch it.

As the article points out though, while most "serious internet-based companies" won't touch AGPL, they will engage with dual-licensed software. They use AGPL software under proprietary license, after paying for it.

At risk of sounding pedantic, legally speaking there is no such thing as using "AGPL software under proprietary license". In that case it is simply software under a proprietary license. This is an important distinction, legally speaking.

As a business owner I consider AGPL the same as a closed source. It's a thing I need to pay for and I'm not about to contribute free labour to it the same way I wouldn't contribute to any other commercial closed source entity.

What definition of open source are you using exactly, that the AGPL doesn't fall under?

Probably something like "a software that I can freely use without exposing myself to legal risk".

(This is just me describing reality. My private software is under AGPL to a significant extent, but I understand why my employer's legal dept does not like AGPL.)

I think that's completely fair, even for more permissively licensed software, I dislike contributing to commercial open source products unless I'm being paid for it.

In that case, If you end up using OSS without any necessity of contribution from you, would you pay for that OSS software? since you did not contribute labor to it.

(Not OP.) If you can, I think you should. Sometimes the type of contribution you can make is not accepted. For example, some projects don’t accept donations.

I do pay for some more permissive open source projects that I use, even ones I contribute back to, yes.

I completely understand organizations banning AGPL software. Having an employee mistakenly violate the license is just too great a risk. The majority of AGPL projects seem to be offering the same product on a different commercial license, which is the only way I'd use an AGPL project. E.g. paying for a non-APGL license to use it without the risk.

There's a lot of people on this forum who work at SaaS startups that also use FOSS software. It ain't just Google.

There are plenty of alternatives like the Business Source License that are perfectly acceptable for majority of the use cases.

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