this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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AGPL is the most restrictive OSI approved license (of the commonly used ones), but it is still a free (libre) open source license. My understanding is just that the AGPL believes in the end-users rights to access to the open source needs to be maintained and therefore places some burden to make the source available if it it's being run on a server.
In general, companies run away from anything AGPL, however, some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don't maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.
As far as documentation goes, you could license documentation under AGPL, and people could still charge for it. It would just need to be kept available for end-users which i don't think is really a barrier to use for documentation.
What is wrong with charging for your services?
Open source licences aren't meant to make it impossible to earn money or anything. As long as companies comply with the licences I don't see anything wrong with it.
If a licence wants to make it impossible to earn money they should put that in the actual licence.
Nothing. The context of this comment thread is "fuck corporations" and then proposing AGPL to solve that. I am merely pointing out that if their goal is to have a non-commercial license then AGPL doesn't solve that, which is why i mention they can charge for their services with AGPL.
You said it was malicious though.
No. I said even if they don't maliciously comply with the license [by making the open sourced code unusable without the backend code or some other means outside of scope of this conversation] then they can charge for it.
The malicous part is in brackets in the above paragraph. The license is an OSI approved license that allows commercialization, it would be stupid for me to call that malicious.
Yes, but how is it malicious to comply with the license? If the license doesn't require the code to be usable without a backend they have fully complied. Does the license even require usable code at all?
As long as they give the source code they are required to give I don't see any problem with it.
The difference is that commercialization is inherent with a free (libre) open source license. Whereas going against the intent, but still legally gray area, is imo malicious compliance because it circumvents what the license was intended to solve in the first place.
But that's all i really care to add to this convo, since my initial comment my intent was just to say that the AGPLv3 license does not stop corporations from getting free stuff and being able to charge for it-- especially documentation. Have a good one