Suprised we aren't seeing more of this

Posted May 5, 2025 2:35 UTC (Mon) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: Suprised we aren't seeing more of this by pizza
Parent article: Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license (Redis blog)

You cannot be expected to know if the party distributing to you has made modifications. However, you are legally obligated to know if they have a right to distribute to you.

AGPL and GPL software that has been modified can no longer be distributed if the modified work violates the original license. That is the core concept in copyleft. The license is revoked if the terms are violated.

There has to be an unbroken licensing chain from the original authors to you where all the code you have received is being provided under a valid license. If not, you have unlicensed software. If anybody before you in the chain was not allowed to distribute, you cannot have gotten a license from them.

Suprised we aren't seeing more of this

Posted May 5, 2025 11:50 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> You cannot be expected to know if the party distributing to you has made modifications. However, you are legally obligated to know if they have a right to distribute to you.

Okay... and how exactly are you to accomplish this?

Note this doesn't just apply to AGPL, or any other F/OSS license, but to literally *everything*, whether in electronic form or not.

How is someone supposed to _ever_ verify the entire supply chain, all the way back to the original author... if they're even alive? After all, copyright doesn't require formal registration, and it is quite common to publish under psuedonyms.

Suprised we aren't seeing more of this

Posted May 5, 2025 14:04 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> How is someone supposed to _ever_ verify the entire supply chain, all the way back to the original author... if they're even alive? After all, copyright doesn't require formal registration, and it is quite common to publish under psuedonyms.

And the GPL is even simpler than most in that regard - to paraphrase the GPL, all you have to do is prove that the original author(s) lawfully released it under the GPL (ie it was theirs to release), and you can completely forget about all the intermediate steps it took to get to you. They're irrelevant.

Cheers,
Wol