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Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

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Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#81

Post by floatingatoll »

raverbashing wrote: post #29
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #6

I don't know if the response here is good, but https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1078... , gives a rationale for not including any AGPL "in" another work and might thus be the reason for the exclusion. See also, https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2630... .

Yeah so if your service completely unrelated to the Stripe service uses AGPL you have to remove it? Doesn't sound good at all

Yes. AGPL attempts to infect with copyleft all services it is integrated with, so contractually prohibiting AGPL integrations is the only defense against AGPL infections.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#82

Post by floatingatoll »

pmontra wrote: post #54
raverbashing wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah so if your service completely unrelated to the Stripe service uses AGPL you have to remove it? Doesn't sound good at all

Yes, I don't understand it. It's as if they had a term preventing customers from using Windows. Obviously (?) it's their right but why?

False analogy. Windows has no copyleft principle and does not attempt to force source licensing terms upon services it is integrated with.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#83

Post by floatingatoll »

nabla9 wrote: post #48
ralph84 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The restriction applies to anyone “using Square Point of Sale, Customer Engagement, Appointments or Employee Management, Square Online Store, and any associated products and services”. I’m not sure why you think it only applies to people selling software. Nothing in the terms says that.

Because it's under > Additional Point of Sale Terms of Service >3. Online Store > I. Your Content and Content Restrictions

To clarify the question without trying to answer it myself, restated in terms of Amazon rather than the less-understood Square Store, here are two similar questions that may have different answers under the Square terms update:

Does the AGPL specify its terms of infection such that “a third-party seller listing a physical CD full of AGPL software sold on Amazon” would bind Amazon by the terms of AGPL source code release for Amazon.com?

Does the AGPL specify its terms of infection such that “a third-party seller publishing CD listings to Amazon using an AGPL script” would bind Amazon by the terms of AGPL source code release for Amazon.com?

And so in those terms, the core question of this thread is, “may I sell items and services on Square that are composed of AGPL code as long as I do not use AGPL-containing or AGPL-integrated code or content when interacting with or publishing listings on the Square Store or when interacting in any way with Square services or APIs?”.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#84

Post by CydeWeys »

inflatableDodo wrote: post #64
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it not be legal? Verifiable does not play a role. You sign a contract that you won’t do it.

Not all contracts are valid.

Yeah but why in particular wouldn't this one be? There's no reason you couldn't have it be a condition of a contract that software licensed under some particular license isn't allowed. Choice of software license isn't a protected class or anything like that.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#85

Post by chrismeller »

danShumway wrote: post #73
bibinou wrote: post #39

This concerns the Online Store, which is their Squarespace clone: https://squareup.com/us/en/online-store not Square Payments.

> By using Square Point of Sale, Customer Engagement, Appointments or Employee Management, Square Online Store, and any associated products and services (the “Services”) It looks like it's a lot broader than just the Online Store, although it doesn't mention Payments specifically. Still, "any associated products and services" sure seems like it would cover Payments as well? What's the dividing line for a product that…

FWIW they also clearly ban a lot of other things in that section that are obviously only targeting the hosted online store. For instance:

> engage in excessive advertising on your website, which includes adding more than three ad units per page, or any advertising that greatly reduces the usability of your website;

Still no idea why they single out AGPL the way they do.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#86

Post by LinuxBender »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #77
nabla9 wrote: post #22

This makes absolutely no sense. I'm almost certain that Square lawyers fucked up big time. They looked at the AGPL and completely misunderstood the context. There is no way in hell anyone can interpret AGPL in a way that makes Square responsible for any license violations their customers make selling software.

I think this is about including AGPL code in a website that you have hosted by Square. They are probably worried that if AGPL code is included, this will result in Square sending it to browsers together along with their own proprietary code, which could be interpreted as an AGPL violation by Square. Honestly they are probably correct to be worried about this because it's pretty unclear whether or not it would be cove…

We have the same issue at my workplace. Legal won't let us near anything AGPL in our projects for those reasons.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#87

Post by zanny »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #66
nabla9 wrote: post #22

This makes absolutely no sense. I'm almost certain that Square lawyers fucked up big time. They looked at the AGPL and completely misunderstood the context. There is no way in hell anyone can interpret AGPL in a way that makes Square responsible for any license violations their customers make selling software.

I mean I never understood AGPL for client-side code to be honest. Would the GPL not cover this use case? My understanding of the license is that the GPL would of been enough, unless the AGPL has some terms I'm not aware of that aren't server specific like ensuring access to code in unobsfucated form or something.

AGPLv3 is a superset of GPLv3. If you never expect your code to be hosted the GPL is all you need to guarantee user freedoms.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#88

Post by sokoloff »

zanny wrote: post #87
giancarlostoro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I never understood AGPL for client-side code to be honest. Would the GPL not cover this use case? My understanding of the license is that the GPL would of been enough, unless the AGPL has some terms I'm not aware of that aren't server specific like ensuring access to code in unobsfucated form or something.

AGPLv3 is a superset of GPLv3. If you never expect your code to be hosted the GPL is all you need to guarantee user freedoms.

I don't think your expectations are the limit, but rather what your users (and their users) will end up actually doing, whether or not you expect or foresee it.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#89

Post by kelp »

bitL wrote: post #10

Scratching Square off my list of service providers. I bet half of their datacenter software is in some way or the other using AGPL-licensed stuff; hypocrisy is just insane.

Up until 2 years ago, I ran Squares Production Engineering Infrastructure group, this included all datacenters and networking. Included automation for both.

Most of our stack was CentOS, MySQL, ruby and java. The DC automation, such as it was, was mostly homegrown layers on top of kickstart.

I don’t know of anything we depended on that was AGPL.

I guess there is probably some berkelydb floating around, and the datastores team uses mongo for an internal app.

AFIK, they still mostly run on this stack but are moving to k8s, then k8s on cloud.

I know nothing about the new legal change, but do know I often had to talk legal down from being overly cautious and paranoid about other technical issues they didn’t understand.

Re: Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

#90

Post by Ericson2314 »

jacquesm wrote: post #32

It's not rare to see even very high profile legal firms totally mess up when it comes to software licensing in general and open source licensing in particular. Chalking this one up to incompetence rather than malice until there is proof it is the latter.

That's fine but there needs to be more demand to force competance.

We all grew lax with copyleft cause all this corporate pro open source stuff, and now there isn't a critical mass of AGPL projects compelling Square's lawyers to read harder. I have no idea how to build that critical mass.

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