[debiandev]

> 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 worked with lawyers, this largely overstates the risk. Companies are happy to discuss, modify and sign new contracts every day.

All these contracts are "unchallenged in court", by definition, because they are entirely custom.

A lot of software licensing contracts for closed source have complex and restrictive clauses to prevent "renting" such software through SaaS or weakening limitations using legal loopholes.

Yet companies still sign such contracts.

Another type of custom and complex contract is employment.

Furthermore, companies sue each other every other day over contract violation around IP, copyright, trademarks, patents but also employment contracts, rent, building regulations, shipment delays, all of that.

The idea that a FLOSS license is some scary monster is propaganda.

The goal of such propaganda is to drive the FLOSS community to provide valuable software for free and with zero strings attached - aka free labor.

[tptacek]

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 review for every signup. New contracts are a big deal.

And, what's more, the contracts we're talking about are all basically pro-forma. They're nothing like the AGPL, which has, in reasonable interpretations, far-reaching impact on IP across the whole company.

[debiandev]

> 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.

I have many other examples but a quick search on the internet can show how many contract-related discussions happen between large companies, suppliers, local governments & so on

Matasano is not the size of a FAANG and similar or maybe it has a small legal team by choice.

[rblatz]

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.

[teddyh]

> 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.

[wglb]

Having worked for a software producer who all but owns one segment of the industry, while they do discuss with their potential clients modifications to the contract, it is fair to say that the terms discussed all relate to fees. There are certain things with respect to IP that are totally not up for discussion.

Additionally, every use or purchase of software undergoes strict legal review, and there are some licenses that are flat not accepted.

This is not propaganda, and it is not in particular motivated to do anything economic to the FLOSS commmunity.

[s17n]

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 to see more software released under AGPL just to screw with Amazon.

[im3w1l]

The further you deviate from using a standard stack the more you have to spend on training.

[joshuamorton]

> All these contracts are "unchallenged in court", by definition, because they are entirely custom.

They do, however, very often use existing language, and custom language is minimized.

> Another type of custom and complex contract is employment.

Where contracts are often almost entirely standard per-company, and often standard between companies. And very rarely is the company in danger from the non-boilerplate clauses.

If you want an example of such a clause, consider Google's own IP clause in its contracts, which contend that Google owns basically all of your IP while you work at Google, unless you take steps to declare ownership of it in advance (and Google approves).

Will this clause entirely hold up in court? Probably not. Do you want to be the one to test it with your multi-billion dollar startup on the line?

The risk of using AGPL software is significantly higher than not, and the benefits are relatively small.

[ran3824692]

> They do, however, very often use existing language, and custom language is minimized.

Guess what, AGPL does that too. Its only 1 paragraph different than GPL.

> Where contracts are often almost entirely standard per-company

"standard per-company", means custom and used used throughout the company. That doesn't make it less risky, and its not like these things don't constantly change and are hugely complicated, just look at privacy policies. AGPL is standard for all companies.

> And very rarely is the company in danger from the non-boilerplate clauses.

Citation needed.