Suprised we aren't seeing more of this

Posted May 2, 2025 22:33 UTC (Fri) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149)
In reply to: Suprised we aren't seeing more of this by NYKevin
Parent article: Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license (Redis blog)

Thanks for your analysis. Do you think a better version of the License would have phrased the passage as follows instead:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you run a modified version of the Program, this modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network ...

Or would that still lead to similar or new issues?

Fixing the AGPL text to match intention

Posted May 4, 2025 10:31 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I don't think there's a fix that meets the FSF's goals. Section 9 makes it clear that the licensee is not bound by the licence simply by running the program; section 13's intent is along the lines of "if you run this program, people with network access to it must be able to get at its source".

And that's the heart of the problem with the AGPL; the FSF wants to both place an obligation on you to supply source if you run the program and give other people access to it, and also to not place any obligations on you if you simply run the program. You can't resolve that by tweaking section 13; you need to also change section 9 to indicate that the requirement to provide source applies to everyone who runs the program and allows someone else to access it over the network.

This conflict, BTW, is not a trivial one; it cuts to the heart of the FSF's Four Essential Freedoms, which define the intention behind Free Software. The challenge the AGPL runs into is that it's trying to restrict Freedom 0 for those people who have access to the software so that more people get access to the software and can exercise the Four Freedoms on their own machines, but it tries to do this without placing too much burden on people exercising Freedom 0.