Making the GPL more scary [LWN.net]

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 18, 2018 16:15 UTC (Thu) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385)
Parent article: Making the GPL more scary

> all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

If all that stuff connects to a running instance of the program, and the instance doesn't need a connection from outside to work (which it hopefully doesn't; otherwise, there's an external point of failure), then this is a short list ("You need Linux, a kvm image running Debian, and this five-line shell script...have fun with your new service instance.").

If you've hacked it so that it pings your service watchdog, or it keeps calling a REST API on your billing server and refuses to work without a signed credentials blob in the reply, or you've built custom data exfiltration to some other product, then the list gets longer.

Arguably, if you built a mobile app that only talks to your service instance, that could count as "custom data exfiltration to some other product."

As always, the only thing that really matters is the stuff that the copyright holder cares about litigating.

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Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 18, 2018 17:13 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

If all that stuff connects to a running instance of the program, and the instance doesn't need a connection from outside to work (which it hopefully doesn't; otherwise, there's an external point of failure), then this is a short list ("You need Linux, a kvm image running Debian, and this five-line shell script...have fun with your new service instance.").

The problem is that the new license requires you not just to release all that stuff but to release it under this new license. Since some of that code will almost certainly belong to somebody else and be released under a different license- good luck releasing Linux under SSPL- it's effectively impossible to comply with the terms of the license. It's de facto making MongoDB available only under their proprietary terms.