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by orangecat
899 days ago
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What doesn't make sense? They don't want AGPL code to accidentally end up anywhere that's publicly accessible, and a lot of the code in their monolith is used across many different products, so a blanket ban seems entirely reasonable. What motivation do you think they have to lie about this? |
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Software you use does not magically [1] end up in your code base, or you are doing something horribly wrong, I can't even begin to imagine how. Like, "Whoops, I downloaded and executed this AGPL-licensed binary, and now this Google process running on my laptop (or phone!) has automatically fetched its source code and put it to prod and linked it to our software, and now oh no, all our code are belong to GNU!". This is ridiculous. This is some massive, solid bullshit we have here.
You can use AGPL software for any purpose within the law, no strings attached. You never need to touch the code, and if you do, you never need to link your product to it. It does not take a lawyer to understand this simple concept. Proprietary software have more restrictions than that, you'd better not have third party proprietary code ending up in your product, although it's not banned at Google. I hope they do check license compliance on their code base anyway, there are automatic scanners for this. So the chances of some AGPL code ending in their repositories seem vanishingly small.
As for why Google would be dishonest, of course we have no proof and we can't know for sure AFAIK. By default I side with Drew DeVault [2], to me this is anti-AGPL propaganda and their goal is to discourage people from licensing their software under AGPL so they have a bigger pool of open source projects they can potentially reuse without having to contribute back, and it works because now people are afraid to license their stuff under AGPL because "businesses" "often" have an AGPL ban. I know of exactly two companies banning AGPL: Google and Apple. Apple already did that with GPLv3 (AGPLv3 being GPLv3 + a clause). Again, does please the big company (and come on, outdated bash and GNU tools on Mac does not make any kind of sense, the GPL never restricted stuff at the process level interface). I'm sure there are smaller businesses thinking that if Google and Apple ban those licenses, they must be bad and they should do too to be safe, while not having a business model where it even makes sense, playing Google and Apple's game.
If I'm to license software under AGPL, I'm giving Google the right to use this software. That they don't want to use it is their loss. They are doing this to themselves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking
[2] https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html
> they want to discourage people from using the AGPL, because they cannot productize such software effectively [...]
> By discouraging the use of AGPL in the broader community, Google hopes to create a larger set of free- and open-source software that they can take for their own needs without any obligations to upstream