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My understanding is that the AGPL is an answer to an older problem and didn't see the cloud coming. It addressed those running web-hosted GPL licensed applicati

My understanding is that the AGPL is an answer to an older problem and didn't see the cloud coming. It addressed those running web-hosted GPL licensed applications who were side-stepping the viral aspect of the GPL by claiming that they were not "technically" distributing a binary by making the application available on the internet as an executing web app. The AGPL requires those who create web applications derived from the AGPL (whether they're distributed as binaries or not) to make the code for their web applications available. The AGPL does not address the cloud-hosting conundrum at all. This conundrum is where a cloud hosting company (e.g. Amazon AWS) can replicate the original author's service offering using the unmodified open source tool (wrapping it and interacting via API at most), and undercut the original author's business model. I.e., you can imagine a power user of some AGPL software competitively putting the software author's company out of business. This is the reason for the recent licensing restrictions around ElasticSearch and MongoDB. The originating companies have had their hosted service revenue models undercut by Amazon AWS offerings that simply repackaged the software as part of their cloud offering. Making the AGPL even stronger by adding in a viral API clause would pigeon hole AGPL software to only the most fringe ideological use-cases as everyone would be afraid to run AGPL software in a business context.

ghaff 7y ago
The AGPL covers the cloud use case insofar as, if a cloud provider takes the AGPL-licensed code, adds additional features, and offers it as a service it would have to add those additional features. (And, potentially, other code that interacts with the AGPL-licensed code; the boundaries are a bit unclear.) Of course, the desire is to keep AWS from offering even just a fully-compatible competing service. But that would 1.) require APIs to be copyrightable and 2.) would, as you suggest, make that software pretty much unusable for most cases. You're right that the AGPL largely pre-dated the cloud providers although the direction things were going in was reasonably clear.
saagarjha 7y ago
I don't think the AGPL actually cares about being able to undercut the original author's business model, as long as you're not just taking open source software, adding minimal value-add, then keeping that as a closed service.
- ghaff 7y ago
  The AGPL was really driven by the increasing prevalence of software being delivered in the form of a service. I don't recall much discussion of business models at the time but there was at least a school of thought that the GPL's protections of software freedom were being eroded because of service providers exploiting this "ASP loophole."

ghaff 7y ago

The AGPL covers the cloud use case insofar as, if a cloud provider takes the AGPL-licensed code, adds additional features, and offers it as a service it would have to add those additional features. (And, potentially, other code that interacts with the AGPL-licensed code; the boundaries are a bit unclear.) Of course, the desire is to keep AWS from offering even just a fully-compatible competing service. But that would 1.) require APIs to be copyrightable and 2.) would, as you suggest, make that software pretty much unusable for most cases. You're right that the AGPL largely pre-dated the cloud providers although the direction things were going in was reasonably clear.

saagarjha 7y ago

I don't think the AGPL actually cares about being able to undercut the original author's business model, as long as you're not just taking open source software, adding minimal value-add, then keeping that as a closed service.

ghaff 7y ago
The AGPL was really driven by the increasing prevalence of software being delivered in the form of a service. I don't recall much discussion of business models at the time but there was at least a school of thought that the GPL's protections of software freedom were being eroded because of service providers exploiting this "ASP loophole."