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Cake day: July 14th, 2024

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  • The difference is that commercialization is inherent with a free (libre) open source license. Whereas going against the intent, but still legally gray area, is imo malicious compliance because it circumvents what the license was intended to solve in the first place.

    But that’s all i really care to add to this convo, since my initial comment my intent was just to say that the AGPLv3 license does not stop corporations from getting free stuff and being able to charge for it-- especially documentation. Have a good one


  • No. I said even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license [by making the open sourced code unusable without the backend code or some other means outside of scope of this conversation] then they can charge for it.

    The malicous part is in brackets in the above paragraph. The license is an OSI approved license that allows commercialization, it would be stupid for me to call that malicious.




  • AGPL is the most restrictive OSI approved license (of the commonly used ones), but it is still a free (libre) open source license. My understanding is just that the AGPL believes in the end-users rights to access to the open source needs to be maintained and therefore places some burden to make the source available if it it’s being run on a server.

    In general, companies run away from anything AGPL, however, some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.

    As far as documentation goes, you could license documentation under AGPL, and people could still charge for it. It would just need to be kept available for end-users which i don’t think is really a barrier to use for documentation.