[tiernano]

Is this not the best thing that could happen? Like now its in maintenance, it can be forked without any potential license change in the future, or any new features that are in that license change... This allows anyone to continue working on this, right? Or did i miss something?

[jagged-chisel]

> ... it can be forked without any potential license change in the future ...

It is useful to remember that one may fork at the commit before a license change.

[phoronixrly]

It is also useful to remember that MinIO has historically held to an absurd interpretation of the AGPL -- that it spreads (again, according to them) to software that communicates with MinIO via the REST API/CLI.

I assume forks, and software that uses them will be held to the same requirements.

[ahepp]

As long as I'm not the one who gets sued over this, I think it would be wonderful to have some case law on what constitutes an AGPL derivative work. It could be a great thing for free software, since people seem to be too scared to touch the AGPL at all right now.

[NegativeK]

They're not the only ones to claim that absurdity.

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

[createaccount99]

I thought that literally was the point of AGPL. If not, what's the difference between it and GPL3?

[lukaslalinsky]

AGPL changes what it means to "distribute" the software. With GPL, sending copies of the software to users is distribution. With AGPL, if the users can access it over network, it's distribution. The implication is that if you run a custom version of MinIO, you need to open source it.

[Weryj]

Pretty sure you can’t retroactively apply a restrictive license, so that was never a concern.

[IgorPartola]

You can, sort of, sometimes. Copyleft is still based on copyright. So in theory you can do a new license as long as all the copyright holders agree to the change. Take open source/free/copyleft out of it:

You create a proprietary piece of software. You license it to Google and negotiate terms. You then negotiate different terms with Microsoft. Nothing so far prevents you from doing this. You can't yank the license from Google unless your contract allows that, but maybe it does. You can in theory then go and release it under a different license to the public. If that license is perpetual and non-revokable then presumably I can use it after you decide to stop offering that license. But if the license is non-transferrable then I can't pass on your software to someone else either by giving them a flash drive with it, or by releasing it under a different license.

Several open source projects have been re-licensed. The main thing that really is the obstacle is that in a popular open source or copyleft project you have many contributors each of which holds the copyright to their patches. So now you have a mess of trying to relicense only some parts of your codebase and replace others for the people resisting the change or those you can't reach. It's a messy process. For example, check out how the Open Street Maps data got relicensed and what that took.

[bilkow]

I think you are correct, but you probably misunderstood the parent.

My understanding of what they meant by "retroactively apply a restrictive license" is to apply a restrictive license to previous commits that were already distributed using a FOSS license (the FOSS part being implied by the new license being "restrictive" and because these discussions are usually around license changes for previously FOSS projects such as Terraform).

As allowing redistribution under at least the same license is usually a requirement for a license to be considered FOSS, you can't really change the license of an existing version as anyone who has acquired the version under the previous license can still redistribute it under the same terms.

Edit: s/commit/version/, added "under the same terms" at the end, add that the new license being "restrictive" contributes to the implication that the previous license was FOSS

[IgorPartola]

Right but depending on the exact license, can the copyright holder revoke your right to redistribute?

[bilkow]

It's probable that licenses that explicitly allows revocation at will would not be approved by OSI or the FSF.

Copyright law is also a complex matter which differs by country and I am not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, but there seem to be "edge cases" where the license can be revoked as seen in the stackexchange page below.

See:

https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists...

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-lice...