[kevindong]

The exact interpretation varies from company to company. Some companies take the strict stance of "if you use this library in any way in your application, you must open source your entire application." I've found that some libraries explicitly state that requirement within their FAQs for their community/free edition as opposed to their commercially (and paid) licensed equivalent.

At the end of the day, it's not worth risking yourself (or your company) when the owners of the library claims a software license works a certain way and you disagree. Sure you might be right and you might even prevail in court, but the potential legal fees usually aren't worth the trouble.

I ran into this issue when I was selecting a library to generate PDFs for my internship over the summer: https://itextpdf.com/AGPL

[nemothekid]

FWIW, I’m pretty sure Facebook also uses mongodb heavily (or at least through its acquisition of parse) I don’t know if they have a commercial license or not, but they aren’t strangers to the AGPL

[snuxoll]

MongoDB also makes their interpretation of the AGPL pretty well known - unfortunately it’s at odds with established interpretation of the normal GPL.

Requiring GPL/AGPL software as a dependency even if you don’t link to it, but instead talk to it over the network does not mean you haven’t developed a derivative work in terms of the letter and spirit of the license. This is in-part why I steer 100% clear of MongoDB, there’s nothing stopping them from changing their view on the license and deciding to pursue legal action against people who use it in non-AGPL compatible manners down the road.