[sarchertech]

FSL is a much simpler court case. “You weren’t allowed to compete with us. You did. Here are the actual damages incurred. Pay us.”

An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.

The potentially overreaching nature of AGPL is one reason it maybe unenforceable. On the other hand if courts lean towards the less viral interpretation Google could get around these issues by modding an AGPL project to run on their proprietary hardware that no one has access to and then simply releasing the modified source code.

[Qwuke]

>An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.

In US courts, the case law shows that the "virality" is not really an open question because of GPLv3 case law, and has never been interpreted that way. I'm not sure why you're commenting about this scenario when you're unaware that this has been actually tried in courts.

In fact, we saw that in infamous Neo4j AGPL case, actually. AGPL worked as intended and protected the AGPL software in a similar way to LGPL. The court went on to protect non-GPL compliant additions that Neo4j made as being considered contagious, even, going even further to protect the original licensee than intended with the original unmodified license.

So, just recapping, you've gone from stating that Amazon could firewall off AGPL because it has no case law, and after learning it does has its case law includes GPLv3 that it simply may not be 'viral' enough because that hasn't been tested in court, to now learning it has been tested in court and successfully enforced.

[acefaceZ]

Not sure what you mean - ‘worked as intended’. The case is still going on in 9th circuit and has amicus briefs from SFC and FSF.

There will be case law after appeal - FSF seems too timid to sue Neo4j (which they could do) and save decades of work.

maybe I misunderstood what you were saying…

https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-submits-amicus-brief-in-neo4j-v...

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2025/jan/13/neo4j-amicus/

[sarchertech]

AGPL has little case law. The extent of virality added by the additional clauses is not clear.

My point is that it doesn’t matter. If it is “viral” to the extent some people are concerned about, Amazon can find ways to firewall it.

If it isn’t, then they it doesn’t really hamper their business model at all.

[Qwuke]

>The extent of virality added by the additional clauses is not clear.

The Neo4J case was one piece of a longstanding part of GPLv3 caselaw where the virality is clear.

>My point is that it doesn’t matter. If it is “viral” to the extent some people are concerned about, Amazon can find ways to firewall it.

Just a recap of your responses so far:

So AGPL has no case law and might even be unenforceable, so therefore it you should use non-free source available licenses. Oh, it does have case law and hyperscalers have been forced to open source their forks like of BDB?

Well, the virality hasn't been tested and FSL would be an easier case. Oh, it has been tested, multiple times and licensees have had to work out an agreement like in the Neo4j case - such that judges would actually be able to rely on prior art unlike FSL?

Okay, well, even if that's all true - Amazon could just firewall it anyways. How? Well they would simply use vast resources to create proprietary hardware, create a fork for proprietary hardware despite that making it impossible to receive patches from the main fork, and then sell that as a service.

Based on the above, I think you've done what you can to convince me.

[jraph]

> Google could get around these issues by modding an AGPL project to run on their proprietary hardware that no one has access to and then simply releasing the modified source code.

Well I guess they could today, I don't see the AGPL preventing them to. As long as the modified source is available under the AGPL I suppose they'd be good to go.

A license that forces someone to release software for specific hardware would be non-free I suppose.

I don't see this being practical though. Running proprietary hardware just for this reason would likely be costly, and not really efficient: someone could restore support for general hardware from upstream / only keep the interesting changes.