Making the GPL more scary [LWN.net]

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 18, 2018 20:59 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
Parent article: Making the GPL more scary

I am not surprised this happen...
I am sympathetic to the AGPL goal but not to the actual text.
Maybe the AGPL goal is simply not possible to implement in a free software license.

The AGPL is problematic from a legal stand point: a software is not a legal entity that can make binding offer, and the realization of such offer depend on the environment where the software run which cannot be controlled by the programmer.

But the SCCP do not close the biggest loophole in the AGPL, but makes it larger:

9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.

So all you have to do is to refuse to accept the license and run the software on your server.
You can even pay someone else to modify the program. As long as they do not run it they do not have to offer the source to anybody except you.

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Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 18, 2018 21:23 UTC (Thu) by federico3 (guest, #101963) [Link] (1 responses)

That's not a loophole - it's perfectly OK to run an copy not modified by yourself and that's by design.

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 19, 2018 2:41 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

It is definitely a loophole from MongoDB's perspective, since it basically nullifies the whole reason the SSPL exists; to prevent the cloud vendors from running an unmodified version of the program on their own hardware and selling access to that.