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by tzs 725 days ago
That link is OK for the general concepts, but some of the details aren't quite right so read the license text if you are in a situation where the details matter. For example:

> The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.

That's an overstatement. The requirement is that you make source available for your program is for "users interacting with it remotely through a computer network".

There are plenty of ways that you could let users communicate with a program on your server that do not involve remote communication through a computer network.
1 comments
exe34 725 days ago
> There are plenty of ways that you could let users communicate with a program on your server that do not involve remote communication through a computer network.

Could you give some examples?

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tzs 725 days ago
There are a couple of categories of ways to communicate that would not involve remote communications through a computer network.

One category is communication that is not through a computer network, such as through serial terminals or by voice.

Another category would be communication that is not remote. AGPL fails to define what it means by "interacting remotely", but where they use that phrase is in a section titled "Remote Network Interaction" which suggests they are using "remote" the way people generally use it in the context of networks. Remote in that context means generally not on the same LAN. If that's the case then while communication over the LAN would be over a computer network it would not be remote communication.

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exe34 725 days ago
these don't seem to be the common cases that matter today - big corps taking open source code and making big money off them without giving anything back to the community and instead occasionally hound at lone developers for timely fixes so they can keep on making the big money.
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