[jxj]

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]

Correct, GPL doesn't have this character.

You say it "fixes" GPL, but as I described it makes AGPL completely unusable for basically any purpose, and it creates a HUGE risk that's in my opinion completely unacceptable, as described.

The only way it seems to work is: 1) it's extremely unpopular by number of projects 2) most private citizens who use it violate the license 3) most potential corporate users have it vetoed by their legal department, which means they plain don't use it

That's not a great situation. It only seems to work (in the rare cases that it's used) because so few people accept it, and the ones that do violate it.

AGPL removes freedom zero, in my opinion.

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

I think my examples illustrate this, but I'm sure I could elaborate more.

The way I read it you cannot write an automation script for managing the MongoDB databases for your Etsy store without opensourcing those scripts.

In fact I disagree that "cloud didn't exist when GPL was created". This also applies to services like banks, and banks certainly existed before GPL, and provided a service.

So that was never a "hole" in GPL.

AGPL is poison because every time you touch it, even operationally, your work belongs to someone else. To call that "Freedom" is Orwellian.

[jxj]

But in the MongoDB case (when it was still using AGPLv3), those companies who violated AGPLv3 did have a solution: pay a fee for a commercial license of MongoDB instead of AGPLv3 which is free. In this way, those companies don't need to open source their code built based on MongoDB. MongoDB get money to go further, because I guess MongoDB people need to raise their family.