Yes, Artifex sued Hancom over their use of Ghostscript [1]. (The article says GPL, but Ghostscript has an AGPL license.) The judge denied a motion to dismiss the claims, and they reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount.

I don't think many developers are aware that Ghostscript has an AGPL license, and I've heard that the commercial license costs $25k per year. It's very easy to just `apt-get install ghostscript` when you want to work with PDFs (e.g. with imagemagick), but this violates the AGPL license when you are running a SaaS application.

There are some permissively-licensed libraries (Apache 2.0) that provide similar functionality, such as PDFBox [2], or PDF.js + Node.js.

[1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/update-on-artifex-v-hanc...

[2] https://pdfbox.apache.org/

[3] https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/

$25k seems a bit on the high end - https://ironpdf.com/licensing/

Also, it's 2019 - Artifex, it's OK, you can publish your prices (https://www.artifex.com/licensing/)

> but this violates the AGPL license when you are running a SaaS application

Only if you modify the Ghostscript source code.

From what I was reading, I think your interpretation might have been the intention of the people who wrote the AGPL license.

But I also know that the AGPL license is usually adopted because they want to sell a commercial license, even if the source has not been modified. Artifex is very explicit about their intention on the licensing page of their website.

It depends on the definition of “modification” and “derivative work”. Artifex is adamant that any software using Ghostscript is a derivative work, and the copyleft will apply, so all of your source code must also be released under the AGPL license. This is especially true if your software cannot function without Ghostscript.

If you are only distributing your application (i.e. not a SaaS app), then you could make Ghostscript an optional plugin that people can manually install (like LAME for Audacity.) But a SaaS app provides access to the application over the network, so you cannot use Ghostscript without a commercial license, or without releasing your application’s source code.

I didn’t see anything about Hancom modifying the Ghostscript source. It was the fact that they distributed Ghostscript along with their own application, and their application depended on Ghostscript for some functionality. That was enough to trigger the GPL copyleft, so they were violating the terms of the license and had to settle out of court. The AGPL means that you would be violating the license by providing access to your app over a network.

Surely it doesn't need to—either you accept the license or you don't accept the license. If you don't accept the license, you can't use the software.

I'd imagine that the challenge with the AGPL is catching and suing the non-compliant services.

If the source is available, I absolutely can use the software—regardless of license. The only thing preventing me from doing so would be either criminal or civil law, and while IANAL, I don’t believe there are criminal penalties for license violations. The copyright holder would have to sue me, and prove that I violated the license, and then they might be able to get a court to force me to stop, pay them, or both.

I am curious whether there are any practical observations, one way or the other, about the AGPL’s enforceability.

Obviously you can use the software. Of course you'll probably get away with a license violation if you're not shouty about it. Similarly, I can use a pirated copy of Windows XP too, with effectively zero risk of getting caught.

Nobody is suggesting that an AGPL licence violation would result in a criminal penalty, but if you got caught you may be forced to release any changes you made to the source code. And you could lose the ability to use the software in future—if your business relied on it you might be screwed.

Personally I think the AGPL is stupid, but people are free to pick whatever license terms they like for their copyrighted works. Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.

The way you get forced is by someone filing a civil suit. My question was has anyone done that and been successful. It looks like the answer is yes, although it was settled out of court and not adjudicated. I am curious if a judge has ever found the AGPL to be a valid license constraint.

Personally, I find “you are licensed to use the software without releasing your modifications on your internet connected computer, however if you open a port and offer it as a service, you are not” to be entirely ridiculous. It seems to me that a license can’t (or at least shouldn’t) hinge on what other software I am or am not running on my computer (eg a webserver).

That is why I asked. I’m all for copyleft (despite the fact that its validity hinges on an inherent affirmation of the validity of the concept of intellectual property), but I passionately hate the AGPL because I think it is an unjust infringement upon my freedom as a user. It’s like saying “you have a license to use this software as long as you don’t run a browser that accesses porn on the same machine”. I think it oversteps the boundaries of copyright-as-designed.