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by josephcsible 1038 days ago
But now you're talking about using an AGPL library in your own program, rather than deploying just an AGPL-licensed program.
2 comments

When you include an AGPL library your program becomes a derivative work, so the rest of your program becomes AGPL-licensed as well. The boundaries of what part of the system should or should not be included are vague, because *GPL licenses are written with C semantics in mind. So, while having a library directly in the same running process definitely makes you work a derivative, it's not clear if you the same is true if the library is a part of a different process and your program talks to it via an IPC, a filesystem, a database, an API, etc. Depending of the interpretation you may have toped-source just a tiny part of your program running on a server, or all server-side and client-side code and all supplemental scripts, tools, etc. needed for the system to run.

So, it's legally ambiguous, and since no-one has legally tested the waters the interpretation of the license can be very different, but most people prefer to stay away from AGPL code altogether.

libraries are software
Yes, but my point is there's a difference between "just deploy their software" and "combine their software with your software and deploy the result".
I agree, but for example it is not obvious whether you can deploy mixed licenses with docker-compose.