No, SSPL requires you to open source your entire stack. That's why the OSI and FSF rejected it. AGPLv3 says, if you modify the software and put it on a network

No, SSPL requires you to open source your entire stack. That's why the OSI and FSF rejected it. AGPLv3 says, if you modify the software and put it on a network, you have to provide a link for anyone accessing the software to download the modified source. There's numerous drafting and technical problems with this arrangement[0] but the only parts of your stack you have to release are the parts that are actually part of the program covered by AGPLv3. The "strong copyleft" strategy[1] is to identify a specific freedom-restricting behavior we don't like and prohibit just that. We're not saying "Amazon is not allowed to use this software", we're saying "Anyone who turns this software into a service needs to provide a way to fork the service and get the software back without losing anything". If such a copyleft license happens to scare a company into buying license exceptions, that's a happy accident. In contrast equitable source doesn't say anything about freedom, it just says "these people need to pay a license fee". That's not FOSS, that's shareware. In FOSS, free-riding is not a bug. The problem with AWS isn't that they aren't paying a license fee, it's that they are building roach motels out of community projects. [0] I'd link to Hector Martin's incredibly informative Mastodon posts regarding the subject, but he deleted his account after crashing out of LKML. As a substitute for that, I'll summarize my hazy memories: - The intended compliance mechanism is to make your app a quine; but that only makes sense for webapps written in PHP/Python/etc. Someone actually put AGPLv3 on an Ethernet stack - how do you comply with that? - It's unclear how license compliance works in a pull request driven Git workflow. If you're running the server locally for testing, and someone accesses it, have you violated the license? - You can filter out the source offer with an HTTP proxy not covered by AGPLv3. That seems like a very wide loophole which the FSF apparently believes would work. [1] e.g. AGPL, SSPL, OpenWatcom, etc