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It’s not the network call, it’s what you do with it. Let’s take redis, pretending it’s AGPL. Adding a new command to the source code: definitely a modificatio
by tyre 2y ago
It’s not the network call, it’s what you do with it.
Let’s take redis, pretending it’s AGPL.
Adding a new command to the source code: definitely a modification.
Adding a new feature to the redis client: also a modification.
Creating a class (RedisPlusClient) that inherits from its client and adds a feature: Maybe a modification? Feels modification-adjacent.
Building a microservice that uses the redis client and exposes the exact Redis API? I don’t know! Maybe? Feels like a technicality that it is “using a network call” so it doesn’t count.
The thing is, I don’t want to think about any of this. I want to build things. We have seen overwhelming evidence that for-profit companies give back to open source, both through contributions and open sourcing their own code.
Are these licenses limiting the actual impact of the projects in exchange for ideological purity? There is consistent feedback from engineers that this is the case.
- remram 2y agoI don't disagree with those new examples, though you've moved the goalpost quite a bit.
- tyre 2y agoI didn’t mean to. I very much don’t know what would or wouldn’t be considered a violation. I think there’s a not-insane-or-bad-faith argument that each of these violate what AGPL is trying to do: force modifications to software into the public domain. To the people who do love copyleft, I could imagine them not agreeing with a network being a clear line of modification, especially with how common distributed systems are. For me and how I read it, I agree with you that it’s not. I also understand lawyers who don’t want to be the test case.
- VMtest 2y agojust leaving this here for reference https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
- skrtskrt 2y agoI think it's worth considering that stuff like Elastic and Grafana tooling at most places is just internal ops & analytics. Elastic yes moreso can be used for user-facing search, but in general the point of these ops technologies is plug it in and let your employees use it. If you wanna modify and have SSO and re-sell it sure yeah you should expect you're gonna need the enterprise license unless you're gonna host a purely vanilla version and layer your own auth over it, which is also possible.