271–280 of 341 posts
For fans of AGPL I suggest checking out EUPL. Half the length of AGPL. Changing/removing portions of the license is allowed. More info: you may have seen this on Hacker News recently: https://www.arp242.net/license.html .
Note that licenses that can have random bits changed or removed have the issue that you need to read them in their entirety each time you encounter them.
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You write this as if it summarizes the discussion, but of course the discussion we can all read here says the opposite: Google's legal concerns are probably not false, and are concerns for multiple other organizations; not only that, but Google has ample reason to be particularly concerned about these kinds of IP issues.
I think it's possible have "Google has concerns about the AGPL for itself" and "Google would like you to not use the AGPL by making you afraid of it".
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I think it's possible have "Google has concerns about the AGPL for itself" and "Google would like you to not use the AGPL by making you afraid of it".
The first statement is almost certainly true. The second is supposition.
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The first statement is almost certainly true. The second is supposition.
Possibly, but I think it is fairly clear how it would help Google to do the second. (To be explicit: I'm not saying they are doing this. But there are others here arguing that this is just not something they could be doing, which is absurd.)
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The remedy for a violation is also in play. Private contract between two companies, cutting a 10 figure check makes it all better. Being wrong about AGPL, you have to release a lot of code that you really don't want to release, that is very important to your core business. That's the other side, uncertainty with acceptable error bars vs uncertainty with unacceptable error bars.
> Being wrong about AGPL, you have to release a lot of code That is also false scaremongering. You always have the option to simply cease distributing until you have re-implemented the AGPL code yourself.
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The AGPL virality is considered such a big risk, and the "scripts to control" clause is considered so sweeping and vague, that Google has its own internal version of R that won't download AGPL libraries from CRAN, because just looking looking at the performance stats from production services in R using an AGPL library could taint the source code of the service itself. Nobody knows.
The "scripts to control" clause as you say is in all versions of the GPL, exactly the same in GPLv3, and slightly different I presume in GPLv2. It has been tested in court, and its been found to not be expansive like the fud you are spreading.
> For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
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When working for eBay I've asked our legal department "So if we do this, are when then safe?" - The answer was always "The court decides, before that noone knows."
Right. That's really the issue -- it's not that the risk isn't there, it's that the risk is always there, so it's an isolated demand for rigor. For example, here's the Windows 10 license: > c. Restrictions. The device manufacturer or installer and Microsoft reserve all rights (such as rights under intellectual property laws) not expressly granted in this agreement. For example, this license does not give you any righ…
Maybe they are. But not doing that would have killed the company, so the uncertainty was likely considered acceptable.
The punishment for violating a Microsoft license is paying Microsoft more money. The cost of not doing that would have likely been more.
The punishment for building your SaaS on AGPL code and having court decide on the virality on a non-favorable way is much more severe, and cannot in general be immediately solved with a little extra money transferred between two companies.
It's all risk management.
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No, there are plenty of circumstances where there laws and/or contractual obligations other than software licenses become involved in software development which can conflict. See healthcare, government, finance, regulated industries, etc.
I've worked in several of those industries. Oddly enough, open source was always easier there. I'd challenge you to find a regulation which prevents open source in any of those industries. I think the one exception -- and this was an extreme example -- was the firmware of a medical device which could endanger human lives if modified. Things were locked down. But generically? I'm batting maybe 75% with open source in…
You can certainly use open source in regulated industries -- the question is, can they risk the legal possibility of being forced to open source the rest of their stack if the a court determines AGPL requires it.
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Google doesn't really care that much about the FLOSS community's contributions - they have in house projects to do everything (even a kernel or two!) just because they have so many engineers. Pretty sure the main reason they don't just ban the use of open source software internally is because it would cause their developers to riot, and the cost savings are a secondary factor. If anything, Google probably would like…
The further you deviate from using a standard stack the more you have to spend on training.
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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…
Wouldn't it be a good idea to "fix" the AGPL in order to make it clearer? It seems to me that every time there is a discussion around GNU licenses many people have no idea how to interpret them and then decide not to use them out of fear. It does not seem to me that this is in the interest of the GNU project. Why not fix this?
Instead people waste time trying to defend something that neither side can prove. And business / Startup doesn't want to risk anything when there are always an alternatives.