Erik I

Filed under #opensource and #observations

I wrote this the other day:

Also you can ask 20 honest developers what they think AGPL means and get 3 or more wildly different explanations, at least if you include “I've no idea except it also works lver the network”.

Besides the typo I immediately also go a message that I could stop spreading FUD and instead point people to https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

Which I have hereby partially done by adding that link.

My point still stands: developers don't know what the AGPL means, and here are two, just from the replies to my comment:

Edit: I should point out that I find these to be very reasonable and not too far from my understanding of AGPL.

Is it not “if you take AGPL code and run it on your server and make it available to other people, you need to give them the code to whatever you're running”? saagarjha

It's the “whatever you're running” that gets complicated if you're using the AGPL code in conjunction with a bunch of other code to deliver some service to customers. What are the rules around how that other code is allowed to interact with the AGPL code before it has to be made available as well? ghaff

And this is just the beginning. I think I've even seen people moving to AGPL while claiming that it wouldn't affect its users at all (the project in question used to be MIT licensed IIRC.)

While I personally think most software should be licensed under permissive licenses such as BSD, MIT and Apache I haven't seen any problems with AGPL.

It is however clear to me that the FSF has some work to do to get people to understand what the AGPL allows and doesn't allow.