Why we’re changing to the AGPL license
It&#x27;s too bad they went with the AGPL, which is a vague and problematic license. For example, by a strict reading, it would seem that you can make changes, add the relevant functionality to link to the changed source code, then stick a proxy in front that removes the link and be in the clear. It also seems you could give the modified version to someone, and they could offer a service based on it without forwarding the source offer to end users.<p>It&#x27;s also unclear regarding upstreaming, and the &quot;virality&quot; of the source distribution requirement. As far as I can tell, for non-CLA projects, effectively there is no way for upstream to be exempt from the AGPL article 13 provisions, which means any AGPLed project that takes contributions needs to build in the source code offer functionality into the canonical version or else they&#x27;d be violating their own license (read: that of every other contributor, which is why this is a problem).<p>Additionally, unless the software is written so that it can package its own source as-running and distribute it to every user, using the AGPL puts your users at risk unless you make it a proper click-through license that users must agree to before usage. Due to its nature, the AGPL is an EULA, not a free software copyleft license. Unlike other open source licenses, it is not a mere copyright license. Users need to be aware of its provisions of it, as they are liable for violations not strictly only by distribution, but also if they just <i>run</i> AGPLed software and happen to make a trivial modification, like editing a single template. This is, in concept, going into the &quot;you shall not run this software on more than X cores&quot; proprietary territory, because it makes the critical change of imposing on requirements <i>outside</i> of distribution, so users need to be aware of it just like they need to click-through proprietary EULAs.<p>The AGPL really is not a good license. I wish people would stop treating it as a magic cure for the &quot;SaaS loophole&quot;. Using it has deep consequences for your users and how the software must behave, and it isn&#x27;t legally tested in a way that guarantees it even will protect you how you think it will. I hope people using it know what they&#x27;re getting into.<p>Here&#x27;s a personal example of an AGPL problem, and how I violated it (as far as I can tell) by doing nothing out of the ordinary. I run dspam on my mail server. dspam is AGPLed (I did not know this). I use Gentoo Linux, so I just installed it, but due to politics&#x2F;inertia Gentoo considers the AGPL as default-accept (which is supposed to be reserved for licenses that are free enough that users need not be concerned about), so I was not prompted to accept it during package installation (like I would have for proprietary packages). Unfortunately, Gentoo is a meta distro. They also carry patches for dspam. This means that by installing dspam, <i>I</i> was patching dspam and compiling it, thus triggering AGPL Clause 13. This means I was liable to make dspam source offers to all my users. Unfortunately, the definition of &quot;user&quot; is unclear, and it could encompass &quot;anyone who sends me email through SMTP which gets delivered through a dspam filter&quot; (or at least &quot;anyone who has an inbox filtered with dspam&quot;, which includes a few other people on my server). Obviously I was unaware of all of this, and did nothing other than &quot;emerge dspam&quot; and configure it. So now I have potentially violated the AGPL (as have all Gentoo dspam users).