LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

LXD has a web gui now. It is fairly basic right now but it is there.

Oh cool! I know there were unofficial ones floating around.

Lawyer here

"IANAL but that's not true? You can take Apache2 and relicense it under AGPL? You can take "less copyleft" license and make it "more copyleft"."

No you can't. That's also not really what is happening here in the link you list.

This gets complicated very quick (and 90% of HN comments in this thread are already sort of wrong), but the short version is:

When you aggregate existing works into a larger work, you can license the larger work in any way that is compatible with the existing works.

Apache2 is compatible in that sense - i can include an apache work in a larger aggregate work licensed a different way.

However, that does not relicense the original works that you are aggegating. For the Apache2 portion of that work - even when part of a larger work, I can still exercise whatever rights Apache2 gives me for the Apache2 version of that work.

The aggregate work itself would also have very little copyright protection, even if you AGPLv3 it.

The only copyright you newly get in the aggregate work is selection, arrangement, etc.

Which means the degree to which you are licensing anything at all is ... quite small.

The easy way to think about it is: even if you release a larger AGPLv3 work containining Apache2 pieces, you could not sue people for taking the Apache2 piece of it, and using it under Apache2. Even if they explicitly use your copy of it, etc.

More than that, people could take all of your aggregate work pieces and use them under their licenses, and you could not stop them.

This already happens - RHEL et al.

Short answer: No in most cases.

You can't create confusion and then sue people over the confusion. This is the purpose of copyright notice - you have to make it clear enough who owns rights to avoid various defenses.

As for your function question: Copyright was created mostly for books, remember.

As such, it gets weird quickly when applied to code.

For example - i write a book, and on page 236, it says at the top "the text of this page is copied from the folowing book " and then copies it inline.

This is probably infringement.

If i instead write a book, and on page 236, it says at the top "for the text of this page, please see page 194 of the following book " and does not copy it inline.

This is not infringement.

Now, could you currently convince a judge how shared library vs static library linking works, and that it matters? Maybe. Moreso than you could a decade ago.

Non-copyleft code already explicitly allows itself to be included and distributed under different licenses. Even closed-source programs are allowed to contain OSS-licensed code as long as the proper attribution and legal notices are preserved. The first TCP/IP stack for Windows was ported from one of the BSDs, and shipped as part of the proprietary OS; does that count as a "relicensing" of the original code?

Taking a look at the official license text, the AGPL makes an explicit distinction between the license on the work as a whole, and specific licenses covering parts of the source: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

> 5.c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged

Emphasis mine. This does indeed refer to the work as a whole, but it also allows for specific exceptions. Section 7 makes two interesting claims:

> If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions.

So if parts of the source code are under the Apache license (which grants additional permissions beyond the AGPL), those permissions remain valid when used outside the AGPL-licensed work.

> When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it.

So yes, it appears you are not required to preserve these additional license freedoms when distributing the source code. But this claim is immediately followed by an enumeration of the standard OSS clauses - right of attribution, preservation of legal notice, and disclaimer of liability - so all the legal requirements posed by the original license are covered.

So if Ubuntu were to choose to do so, it is free to remove the Apache 2 license (but not its legal notice, for that it needs permission from the original copyright holders) from any copies they distribute, and still be compliant with the original license.

because it is obviously contrary to the purpose of the AGPLv3

It isn't contrary to that license: the purpose of the GPL (and by extension, the AGPL) is to ensure that the source code remains free. It does so by imposing additional restrictions on distribution on top of what is required by MIT/BSD/Apache licensed code. Removing clauses that allow to take (parts of) the code and make it proprietary isn't contrary to the purpose of the AGPL -- it is however contrary to the (supposed) intentions of the original copyright holders who presumably chose their license for a good reason.

Note again that this isn't really different from what the GPLv2 allowed to do (from https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html):

> 2.b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

I remember this same discussion happening 20 years ago with the players being the Linux kernel and *BSD driver code; strictly speaking, Linux developers could take BSD driver code, preserve the legal notice, and distribute the complete code under GPLv2 and still be compliant with the BSD license. In practice, people honoured the original license and I'm sure you can still find dual-licensed BSD/GPL parts in some places in the kernel tree.