Honestly they are probably correct to be worried about this because it's pretty unclear whether or not it would be covered. At the very least, by making it against the TOS it is clear that it's the users fault not theirs if there is a violation.
This is a great advantage of the AGPL IMO. You can release your free software/open source code, and big tech companies won't use your code and make lots of money.
Some companies tried to relicence their code to some 'source available'/'non commerical' licence because they didn't like the MIT's lack of conditions. AGPL could have helped.
As an example, let's say that I have a game. That game happens to want to have a way of rendering some HTML content for printing / making a PDF. It's OK to ship an open source thing with your game, like a hypothetical FrozenFluff web-browser licensed in AGPL. There are two distinct entities there: a FF binary that gets called with a file to render (which is AGPL and an AGPL processed result that is under the copyright of whomever's material was rendered) and another distinct binary the GameX that happened to call an external process.
The line to cross there is that the AGPL stuff can't be linked against your own program. I'm even more unsure how a module might or might not be licensed. I think since that's an addin then the code for the module (including headers) would have to be AGPL compatible and released, but that the rest could probably be closed.
This line is less clear when it comes to websites however. I think the best equivalent would be to make a wrapper interface that is AGPL licensed, published, and links to/calls the AGPL software. It should have a distinct URL. That URL might only be on the localhost (for security) and would hand back whatever results exist. The proprietary interface could talk to that URL and get results.
I am also not a lawyer, however my take on many legal things is that it doesn't matter what my take is, or even if courts will agree with my take, what matters is whether the benefit is worth the hassle if I end up needing a lawyer to deal with it.
Even if you "win," the engagement with lawyers can cost you so much that it becomes a pyrrhic victory, and the amount of time required to deal with certain legal squabbles is astounding.
So sometimes, the right thing to do is to shy clear of anything that carries with it some risk of legal potholes.
It does make some sense to see AGPL singled out, because it is different from most other free and open source licenses in one major way.
Almost all other free and open source licenses only require you to distribute modified source code of a derivative work you've made if you distribute that derivative work.
If I take code under those licenses, modify it, link it with my own code, and just run the resulting derivative work on my computer, they do not require me to distribute those modifications or my code, no matter what I'm using the program for, or where from, who from, or how I get its input, or what I do with, where I send, or who I give its output.
Not so with AGPL. With AGPL, the requirement to distribute derivative works can be triggered by code running entirely on my computer if it gets its input from and sends its output to people over a network.
That's a huge difference from prior free and open source licenses.
And AGPL isn't the only "must publish all your server's source code" license available, so to prohibition is too specific if that's the actual reason.
This is why we have the DMCA safe harbor provisions - it'd be incredibly easy to be on the hook for copyright infringement as a company hosting any user content otherwise. Those safe harbor provisions aren't a blank check to knowingly commit wanton copyright infringement however, as can be seen with all the legal wrangling over Megaupload, as an example [1].
Square knows about the AGPL, knows they might not be abiding by it's terms if they redistribute AGPL code, and knows they probably don't have the right to redistribute under any other term. They can choose to knowingly possibly violate the license, or to knowingly commit copyright infringement, or to ban AGPL code. Those first two options, with that "knowingly" in there, open them up to potential legal action.
> And AGPL isn't the only "must publish all your server's source code" license available, so to prohibition is too specific if that's the actual reason.
If you make Square's lawyers aware of some of those other licenses, it wouldn't suprise me if they get banned too for the same reason. It's not like they have psychic knowledge of the existence of all licenses. Failure to audit the universe doesn't mean that's not their reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload#Safe_harbor_provisi...
If the third party sold a copy of MS Windows using Square's services/software/platform, could Square even in theory be sued by Microsoft for copyright infringement?
It sounds like "yes" from my reading of what you write. So AGPL isn't something special.
Their lawyers don't need to be psychic about other licenses. Why did they specifically qualify with "v3"? That is, the original Affero license is one of the other alternatives, yet they seem to allow it.
If Square was knowingly engaged in the distribution of Microsoft's software against Microsoft's license terms, absolutely. (EDIT: Well, I'm assuming they're helping distribute it, might be "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" otherwise?)
> So AGPL isn't something special.
Correct...ish. I'm sure piracy, if not explicitly against the ToS, will get you kicked off too. The closest the AGPL gets to being special is the nebulous situation we find debated throughout this HN discussion tree - is it legal for Square to distribute? It's reasonable that customers might think so. It's reasonable that square's lawyers might think not.
But you've pointed out that even that isn't unique to the AGPLv3 specifically - so why call it out, specifically? My wild uneducated guess - a customer used AGPLv3 software, Square became aware of it somehow (license review team? or perhaps someone tried to exercise AGPLv3 rights and requested server code?), and eventually involves their Lawyer. Lawyer then looks into the specific case of their customer using specific software, reads the license of said software (AGPLv3), and becomes nervous about Square's possible legal exposure.
After the awkward conversation with their customer (possibly much like the discussion in this HN thread as to if Square would/wouldn't be knowingly facilitating AGPLv3 license violations by not sharing their own code, and thus legally liable), Square settles the matter by banning the specific license outright, possibly after giving them a chance to move away from AGPLv3 software first since it wasn't strictly against the ToS, and then explicitly adds it to the ban list for the benifit of customers and customer service who probably weren't privy to whatever lengthy private discussions might've been had with that one specific customer.
You need artificial stupidity to misunderstand the "Interacting with Program through a computer network" in the way Square seems to understand it. Distributing software via online store is not interacting with the program.
Has that been tested in a court yet? If it hasn't, then a lawyer would immediately see risk.
I mean, look at Oracle vs Google on whether or not an API is copyrighted.
MongoDB's new license targets scenarios where Google would provide a hosted MongoDB service to their customers (like Amazon's RDS offering, for example). It has no impact on individual customers personally spinning up their own MongoDB on their own set of servers for their own use.
>3. Online Store > I. Your Content and Content Restrictions
They looked at the AGPL and completely misunderstood the context. There is no way in hell anyone can interpret AGPL in a way that makes Square responsible for any license violations their customers make selling software.