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Feels to me like if this goes to court there's a good chance the AGPL will be thrown out as-is. Otherwise, it means that if an engineer accidentally pushes a co

by gfodor 5y ago

Feels to me like if this goes to court there's a good chance the AGPL will be thrown out as-is. Otherwise, it means that if an engineer accidentally pushes a configuration error to a firewall for a few minutes, and one individual happens to hit the site while it is exposed, suddenly the company has to disclose all of its IP. This seems relatively insane, so if they're going to push on it so hard to make a political statement it may on net be worse to see it be thrown out. You know damn well this will go to court before Trump's army of lawyers concedes and releases any source code. And, as usual, it is going to revolting to see tribalism consume everything - I suppose it was a matter of time before supporting the GPL became a "blue or red team" position.

adrr 5y ago
Default copyright law doesn’t allow for copying the source. AGPL provides people with more rights than the default. Assuming it is a registered copyright, if AGPL license is found invalid then copyright owner could file for statutory damages which could be quite high.
onionisafruit 5y ago
If it's decided that AGPL isn't a valid license, that will mean that Trump's org and most of the rest of us have no license to use Mastadon and thousands of other software projects.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Correct. I'm not sure of your point. This would obviously be immediately rectified with a new version that addresses any judgement.
  - onionisafruit 5y ago
    I had no point. It's just interesting to consider the fallout from that. Some projects could relicense as you say if they have consent from all of their copyright owners, but other projects aren't in a position to do that. They have contributors who can't be contacted or wouldn't be willing to relicense their work.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Ah that's true, fair point that it could leave projects in limbo.
DFHippie 5y ago
> suddenly the company has to disclose all of its IP I think you need to explain your scenario a bit better. > I suppose it was a matter of time before supporting the GPL became a "blue or red team" position If you have a habitual rule breaker and one team's fundamental rule is that this rule breaker is always right, then yes. Put a legal constraint anywhere in his vicinity and give him enough time to wander and he will violate the constraint. Contracts, tax laws, disclosure laws, the structure of democracy itself. Then the team decides it is the constraint itself that was in error, not their leader, and away we go.
- gfodor 5y ago
  > I think you need to explain your scenario a bit better. If I'm developing a mastodon fork that I intend to run on a small private network for my company, and I accidentally expose it to the internet for a few minutes in error, and a person hits the site, under the letter of the license I am forced to disclose my source code to that person. My IP is no longer in my control and has been disclosed to a third party. This is not complicated. That scenario may be far fetched, but it becomes less far fetched if we actually get to a court case where a site was up for a little while and then was taken down and the legal system needs to rule on if this can be enforced from such scenarios. The political nature of this being disclosed publicly also seems like a huge error if they expect to be able to force source disclosure in court.

by gfodor 5y ago

adrr 5y ago

Default copyright law doesn’t allow for copying the source. AGPL provides people with more rights than the default. Assuming it is a registered copyright, if AGPL license is found invalid then copyright owner could file for statutory damages which could be quite high.

onionisafruit 5y ago

If it's decided that AGPL isn't a valid license, that will mean that Trump's org and most of the rest of us have no license to use Mastadon and thousands of other software projects.

gfodor 5y ago
Correct. I'm not sure of your point. This would obviously be immediately rectified with a new version that addresses any judgement.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  I had no point. It's just interesting to consider the fallout from that. Some projects could relicense as you say if they have consent from all of their copyright owners, but other projects aren't in a position to do that. They have contributors who can't be contacted or wouldn't be willing to relicense their work.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Ah that's true, fair point that it could leave projects in limbo.

DFHippie 5y ago

> suddenly the company has to disclose all of its IP I think you need to explain your scenario a bit better. > I suppose it was a matter of time before supporting the GPL became a "blue or red team" position If you have a habitual rule breaker and one team's fundamental rule is that this rule breaker is always right, then yes. Put a legal constraint anywhere in his vicinity and give him enough time to wander and he will violate the constraint. Contracts, tax laws, disclosure laws, the structure of democracy itself. Then the team decides it is the constraint itself that was in error, not their leader, and away we go.

gfodor 5y ago
> I think you need to explain your scenario a bit better. If I'm developing a mastodon fork that I intend to run on a small private network for my company, and I accidentally expose it to the internet for a few minutes in error, and a person hits the site, under the letter of the license I am forced to disclose my source code to that person. My IP is no longer in my control and has been disclosed to a third party. This is not complicated. That scenario may be far fetched, but it becomes less far fetched if we actually get to a court case where a site was up for a little while and then was taken down and the legal system needs to rule on if this can be enforced from such scenarios. The political nature of this being disclosed publicly also seems like a huge error if they expect to be able to force source disclosure in court.