cic48

Chris DiBona is paid to care about exactly this issue. Compliance is his job description and AGPL policy companywide is comfortably in that portfolio. That you disagree with him does not indict Google nor create an alternative universe where Googlers are setting out unprompted to screw the free software world that gave them 50% of their infrastructure for no reason other than fear.

You underestimate the rigor required in compliance. We are talking about FAANG compliance, too, which holds nary a candle toward compliance in other verticals. This thread should illustrate why compliance decisions are largely made independently of engineering.

The error is using a pejorative term of FUD to identify uncertainties that are routine in every legal review ever performed. What you’re saying is you have a different risk assessment for your business and you’d take the advice and proceed anyway. That’s your prerogative. That does not extend to “different assessments from my own are objectively wrong,” which is what calling them FUD implies.

Engineers seek hard truth, which is why the malleable truth of contract and license law is ever elusive. They’re different takes on truth.

Free as in beer with the expectation of Venmo, is it?

Joke aside, given Stallman’s writings about large businesses and their practices, characterizing a policy document as a “tirade” is a strange position. They’re not exactly buying airtime to advocate against the license. They’ve chosen to make a policy open access, something we’d normally applaud.

Not only possible, it’s a fact. Borg executables make many assumptions about available runtime services and cannot operate in their absence. It’s probably impossible to derive and operate the same artifact Google is running without a complete Google architecture in place and operating, from Chubby on up.

How does one comply with the AGPL in that scenario? “Rearchitect a not stupid way” is probably the answer here, so it’s a nonstarter.

Perhaps people would listen more readily if you didn’t ascribe malevolent falsehoods to routine risk management and identified any idea other than your own as intellectually deficient. There are reasons and advantages to monorepos in some circumstances that you haven’t considered, for example, because you haven’t been exposed to them. Binary dumb/not dumb across the board is a junior engineer argument, and you’re better than that.

I’ve followed you for a while, Drew, and it’s a recurring theme. Respectfully, you could stand to listen from time to time. This is one of those times.

I’ve taken AGPL through two FAANG reviews. Both arrived at the same very-much-not-FUD legal conclusion.

Paragraph 1 of section 13 requires modifications to be disclosed and source code for them to be offered to remote users. The license uses the term of art Corresponding Source for this.

Corresponding Source is defined in section 1 in a crystal clear way. Two separate teams of lawyers concluded that they could coherently argue the Corresponding Source definition implied not only the modified AGPL software, but also stuff that merely _uses_ it, on the basis that “scripts to control” among other things implies the infrastructure most shops build around software, such as Borg configuration and possibly by extension Borg. After all, a modified version of PostGIS is only useful to run in context, and Corresponding Source requires the context.

AGPL is unchallenged in court. The risk to being wrong about it as huge. It’s risk aversion, not ideology, and it’s important to remember that identifying an argument as part of legal review does not call it the correct one. Anyone who’s ever worked with legal matters knows there is no such thing as “correct,” there are rulings. The existence of the argument condemns the license for FAANG, not its validity. Testing that validity against a claim is perilous.

Perhaps if random engineers stopped calling legal opinion FUD and falsehoods and took a moment to listen to the feedback from lawyers who didn’t write the license, we’d get somewhere with finding a palatable license for all parties. Instead, we get a holy war.

Strong disagree on developers not shooting themselves in the foot. If it’s on GitHub, it ships. If you think about licenses in your day to day engineering, you are the 1%.