AGPL is very controversial. I'm clearly on the "won't touch it with a 10 meter pole" side.
There are people with other opinions, but even they agree that this is not tested in court, and it's more expensive to be sued, even if you win, than to just buy (or write from scratch) ANY alternative to the AGPL software in question.
AGPL is a legal landmine. You can't plug it into anything else, even for your own purposes.
Let's say you use these to create a guest wifi network. According to AGPL it looks like you must now opensource any and all scripts that you use to manage this environment.
In other words that one-off script you used to loop over all your access points during setup must be opensourced. Oh, it has details about your internal asset tracking system? Well, they now have to be public. Oh, it relies on your internal database? I guess that's opensource now too.
Did you even keep that one-off script? AGPL demands that others must be able to run what you run, essentially. It says that everything you do operationally to your service must now be documented and published.
You want to connect your internal SSO to the AP? Sorry, you better instead change it so that your internal SSO takes whatever protocol the AGPL software already takes. Oh, that's not feasible? Ok, give up then.
1 year later… oh shit oh shit oh shit, someone added internal SSO to the AGPL software! Now we have to opensource that, but we can't because it includes code we licensed from a third party only for nondistribution!
AGPL only makes sense for organizations that fundamentally ONLY will EVER run open source software (like FSF and that's it), and usually not even then.
Also ideologically it's a huge violation of freedom. What I do in my own home is absolutely none of your business. What executes on my hardware is my business.
For those who disagree about my examples: Yeah… I'm personally not a lawyer (but HAVE consulted with lawyers about this). You may be right. In the end a court will decide. But do you want to take this poison pill in order to find out in court if you die?
So GPL doesn’t have this character? Like the GPLv2 taken by Linux kernel. I have an impression that AGPL only add “A” to GPL to adapt itself to the cloud era. Because a cloud/service deployment is not treated as redistribution in GPL, considering there wasn’t cloud at the time GPL was made. So some big cloud company can deploy GPL software on cloud without open source action because they are not actually “distribute” software, instead only distribute a service. AGPL fix only this hole created by cloud.
knorker|5 years ago
There are people with other opinions, but even they agree that this is not tested in court, and it's more expensive to be sued, even if you win, than to just buy (or write from scratch) ANY alternative to the AGPL software in question.
AGPL is a legal landmine. You can't plug it into anything else, even for your own purposes.
Let's say you use these to create a guest wifi network. According to AGPL it looks like you must now opensource any and all scripts that you use to manage this environment.
In other words that one-off script you used to loop over all your access points during setup must be opensourced. Oh, it has details about your internal asset tracking system? Well, they now have to be public. Oh, it relies on your internal database? I guess that's opensource now too.
Did you even keep that one-off script? AGPL demands that others must be able to run what you run, essentially. It says that everything you do operationally to your service must now be documented and published.
You want to connect your internal SSO to the AP? Sorry, you better instead change it so that your internal SSO takes whatever protocol the AGPL software already takes. Oh, that's not feasible? Ok, give up then.
1 year later… oh shit oh shit oh shit, someone added internal SSO to the AGPL software! Now we have to opensource that, but we can't because it includes code we licensed from a third party only for nondistribution!
AGPL only makes sense for organizations that fundamentally ONLY will EVER run open source software (like FSF and that's it), and usually not even then.
Also ideologically it's a huge violation of freedom. What I do in my own home is absolutely none of your business. What executes on my hardware is my business.
For those who disagree about my examples: Yeah… I'm personally not a lawyer (but HAVE consulted with lawyers about this). You may be right. In the end a court will decide. But do you want to take this poison pill in order to find out in court if you die?
jxj|5 years ago