They do, but it requires the existance of a dual license for that project, which usually requires copyright reassignment was put in place from the project's inception.

The current maintainer can't just sell a copy under non-AGPL if there are other copyright holders (contributors).

Well, this is the heart of the issue. Chris DiBona has publicly stated that AGPL software just isn't valuable enough to care about. The authors of such software tend to overestimate its utility.

https://www.theregister.com/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source...

"Person who benefits monetarily from developers avoiding AGPL suggests developers should avoid AGPL".

I'm surprised Googlers don't have betters ways to spend their time than having such furious debates about the licensing of supposedly worthless software. Google fear AGPL so much that they used to ban you from using it for projects hosted on Google Code: https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/13/google_code_accepts_a...

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.

Though they try to hide it it does seem that ideology is driving this at Google - not practicality.

I mean, Google code banning AGPL kind of gives the game away. That, and him saying that Apache (most liberal) is really his favorite license. Oh and "we never really wanted any of the AGPL code it's all crap anyway".

None of those things are about rigor in compliance. Those are about a corporation stamping its feet.

> Chris DiBona is paid to care about exactly this issue.

Right, which doesn't really address the point being made above, which is that Chris DiBona is paid to care about the issue, has a position on it, and now has a reason to claim that AGPL code is not useful.

If they don't want to use AGLP software anyway, then they have nothing to complain about.

I'm a fan of the GPL etc, but in this article he is saying that in 2011, most of the complex AGPL software that would be useful to Google has a substantially similar version already implemented inside of Google. That's something I could believe about Google, especially 9 years ago.

"MongoDB is probably the most prominent AGPL project, he said, but it replicates software already used within the Google back-end infrastructure. Google uses a proprietary custom-built distributed database known as BigTable. The company has repeatedly indicated that it will not open source BigTable, but it has published a research paper on the platform, and its basic ideas are now used in open source platforms such as Hadoop HBase and Cassandra.

In similar fashion, the company has not open sourced core platforms such as the Google File System (GFS), its distributed file system, and MapReduce, its distributed number-crunching platform."

He also made this quote:

""If you look at the interior of Google and how we make software, we don't launch a lot of software to the outside world," he said. "With the AGPL, you have to be very, very careful with how it is expressed. Otherwise you have to invoke the sharing in many different places. [The ban] is really about saving engineering time."

This part sounds like a partial truth and a partial lie. I'm sure it does save a little on engineering time, but it seems odd not to acknowledge the elephant in the room that they may have to share software they don't want to.

> the elephant in the room that they may have to share software they don't want to

This is certainly not a controversial topic for anyone working in a software company. There are always pieces of software that a commercial entity is not willing to share freely with the whole world.

Oh absolutely, but it does seem like they prefer to genuflect to open source / free software ideas and it seems less distasteful to give a more tactical answer.

I release my open-source software under the AGPL with the option for different licensing upon discussion or negotiation, partly for this reason. The other reason is that common open-source licenses are generally incompatible with one another, and I'm happy to overcome those incompatibilities via alternative licensing for other open-source projects.

Google is in the position to just use non-AGPL alternatives or build their own. That an open source library exists doesn't obligate Google to use it.

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.