The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with

Post by jcranmer » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #225

p0llard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The former, as a general rule, does not create a derivative work. It's specifically called out in the GPL FAQ as something that does not create a derivative work. Could you point me in the direction of a court ruling establishing this general rule? I couldn't find anything after a quick search. You didn't mention this part of the GPL FAQ (directly after the part you talked about): > But if the semantics of the comm…

Courts also generally consider things like long-standing precedent and decades of industry practice, as well as estoppel. It's a practice that everyone in an industry has done for decades, which matches the general consensus understanding throughout the FOSS developer community, in addition to being the interpretation of the authors of the license. As I understand it, the rationale for that FAQ entry was that a blank…

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

debiandev wrote: post #227

tptacek wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, companies are not happy to discuss, modify, and sign new contracts every day. They are quite hesitant to. At Matasano, it became our practice simply to tell new clients we'd be happy to sign their paper and not ours, because we'd lose weeks just to get to the point where their legal would consider looking at our contracts. At my last company, we non-negotiably used our own contracts, and budgeted a month to legal…

> No, companies are not happy to discuss, modify, and sign new contracts every day. They are quite hesitant to. [citation needed] > And, what's more, the contracts we're talking about are all basically pro-forma. I had very custom employment contracts with 2 well-known large tech companies. When asking to remove some clauses and add new ones they did not flinch at the ask and let me have meetings with their lawyers.…

Post by s17n » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 10:04 PM UTC

debiandev wrote: post #120

cic48 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve taken AGPL through two FAANG reviews. Both arrived at the same very-much-not-FUD legal conclusion. Paragraph 1 of section 13 requires modifications to be disclosed and source code for them to be offered to remote users. The license uses the term of art Corresponding Source for this. Corresponding Source is defined in section 1 in a crystal clear way. Two separate teams of lawyers concluded that they could cohere…

> AGPL is unchallenged in court. The risk to being wrong about it as huge. It’s risk aversion, not ideology, and it’s important to remember that identifying an argument as part of legal review does not call it the correct one. Anyone who’s ever worked with legal matters knows there is no such thing as “correct,” there are rulings. The existence of the argument condemns the license for FAANG, not its validity. Having…

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

Post by cycloptic » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #223

cycloptic wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is still a choice, but your lawmakers have made it for you. Alternatively, you can choose not to develop for those industries.

I think you'll find few people who are willing to make changes to those things just to implement an AGPL library --- and even fewer who would call it a "simple solution".