[mindcrime]

Are they unclear about what copyright means?

Something I've learned over the years is that, when it comes to legal issues, things are rarely black and white. In this case, whether or not Inspeqtr should be required to adhere to the AGPL probably comes down to whether or not it is legally a "derived work". And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there isn't a large body of case law covering the situation where a product is completely re-implemented in a different language. But it certainly seems within reason to say that a court could find that this is a derived work, and therefore in violation unless the AGPL license is used.

Now, whether or not this sort of thing is covered by the spirit of the GPL/AGPL is another question. But it probably is, if you consider the stance of Stallman and the FSF vis-a-vis Free Software. Remember, they basically consider all proprietary software to be a sort of immoral, unethical affront to humanity.

[IamThePherocity]

Fair enough point, though I don't feel this is a gray area. The chilling effect alone, being that I could be sued for simply looking at open source code is disturbing. Because that's what it boils down to. Most of our software today is a derivative work of something. I looked at rails code, so does that mean I can never write a web framework lest I be sued?

[wtallis]

> "I looked at rails code, so does that mean I can never write a web framework lest I be sued?"

No. At most it means you might have to adhere to the license Rails uses, if your work is sufficiently related to be a derived work.