Hacker News Reader

Comment by Qwuke | Hacker News Reader

Is Amazon Linux a common Linux distro? If so, it's often distributed with AGPL licensed code, I can think of a few pieces of software it has that are AGPL. They haven't been able to do internal forks of Ghostscript, if they were ever to do so, because of AGPL.

Debian is also the other more common one distros with AGPL software included with it.

Other things like forks of BerkleyDB by hyperscalers have all ended up as FOSS because of AGPL. Presumably this is a better example of where non-AGPL code would have not actually seen the light of day.

View on HN

These distros package AGPL software, but are these AGPL packages part of the base install (I don't think so), and does Amazon use this software on production?

>are these AGPL packages part of the base install

For several Amazon Linux AMIs, yes and yes! For Debian, the software are in the main archive, actually.

> For several Amazon Linux AMIs, yes and yes!

Okay, I believe you, I'm not familiar with this. I'd still be interested in knowing which specific AGPL software Amazon would use themselves (note, I'm sure they distribute AGPL software through their distro, that doesn't mean they use it themselves).

> For Debian, the software are in the main archive, actually.

I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.

So for Amazon, I used to work there and not sure I can talk about specifics, but there was AGPL software used outside of the AMIs but they were approved on a case by case basis. Ghostscript is public and used in the AMIs that are shipped standard, and ofc is used sometimes by Amazon. And if any modifications went out, it was of course gladly republished, but I don't think any forks of AGPL software were being maintained to the best of my knowledge.

>I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.

No, afaik, unfortunately. That might drastically change how you distribute its base. I was a little unclear but I had meant "No but at least the most common distro ships it in their archive" with my first comment.

Right! Interesting, thanks.

Hadn't thought about Ghostscript!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com