- https://benhoyt.com/writings/flyio-and-tigris/ (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39360870)
AGPL does not mean you have to share everything you've built atop a service, just everything you've linked to it and any changes you've made to it. If you're accessing an S3-like service using only an HTTPS API, that isn't going to make your code subject to the AGPL.
I’ve sold Enterprise Saas to Google and we had to attest we have no AGPL code servicing them. This is for a CRM-like app.
I am not so sure about that. Otherwise, you could trivially get around the AGPL by using https services to launder your proprietary changes.
There is not enough caselaw to say how a case that used only http services provided by AGPL to run a proprietary service would turn out, and it is not worth betting your business on it.
This is a very interesting proposition that makes me reconsider my opinion of AGPL.
(Regardless of how you see the AGPL)
I've never seen someone put this into words, but it makes a lot of sense. I mean, idealistically computers are deterministic, whereas the law is not (by design), yet there exists many parallels between the two. For instance, the lawbook has strong parallels to the documentation for software. So it makes sense why programmers might assume the law is also mostly deterministic, even if this is false
That it's possible to interpret the AGPL both ways (that the prior hack is legal, and that it is not), and that the project author could very well believe either one, suggests to me that the AGPL's terms aren't rigidly binding, but ultimately a kind of "don't do what the author thinks the license says, whatever that is".
Correct, this is a known caveat, that's also covered a bit more in the GNU article about the AGPL when discussing Software as a Service Substitutes, ref: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html.en