throwaway6829

As someone who has worked in Apple's hardware engineering for years, you're pretty much 100% wrong in everything you've said.

I assume you haven't contributed a line of code to the project, so it's a bit presumptuous to knock it.

It's not that simple. Even if you're a company that wants to use the software and contribute changes upstream, it's still a dumb idea to use AGPL software.

Because of the loose definition of what constitutes a derived work, modifying AGPL software (even if you put those modifications upstream) means you might have to open source your entire software stack. The AGPL is not like the LGPL, it doesn't contain any exceptions for linking against it in an overall product. Unless you have clear service boundaries, you are creating a derived work every time you use AGPL software in a service.

In my company, our lawyers outright forbid the use of AGPL software altogether for this reason. Even software that's only used internally. As _delirium mentioned above[1], that's not entirely an unwanted thing from the licenser's perspective: they typically do this so you'll buy their commercial license. But don't assume the only people who don't like AGPL are non-contributing freeloaders.

We submit tons of stuff upstream on a regular basis at my company, but we simply can't do it with AGPL software. Seeing any reference at all that our company (which has some of the deepest pockets in the planet) uses AGPL software anywhere in its stack will open ourselves up to lawsuits immediately. So we just don't touch it, ever.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8095024

Where I work[1], AGPL software is strictly and unconditionally forbidden to use for anything, even things that are completely internal and will never see a public user.

The fear that our lawyers have is that, since putting up the software in a service counts as a derived work, our whole software stack (including the stuff we don't open source) will have to be opened along with it. There have to be clear service boundaries between the AGPL software and the stuff we write ourselves, and the lawyers don't trust us to write in appropriate boundaries.

It's really kinda tragic, because we actually do submit source code upstream when we make changes to open source software that we run internally. As in, if it's an OSS product that we just use for some dumb internal automation thing, we'll submit patches if the license is BSD or MIT, but as soon as GPL (especially AGPL) hits anything suddenly the lawyers get paranoid because of what constitutes a "derived work", which can be interpreted as anything that links against the software to make a complete product.

The upshot of this is, if the OSS software is on an unrestrictive license like BSD or apache, we contribute upstream. If it's GPL or especially AGPL, we simply don't touch it, ever.

[1] A very, very well known technology company.