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Charlotte šŸ¦ therian

scorching foss take
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the agpl license is only open source by technicality. In many cases itā€™s unclear to impossible to actually follow the advertisement requirements for changed AGPL code. especially if the AGPLā€™d code provides no user interface, but instead provides data to a user interface

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re: scorching foss take
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@charlotte Feels like there should be a .well-known URI for license information

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re: scorching foss take
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@charlotte Just checked the IANA and no such identifier exists šŸ˜”

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re: scorching foss take
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@crumbcake Hiding a file somewhere isnā€™t a prominent advertisement to the user

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re: scorching foss take
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@crumbcake also it is unclear whether:

  • a user using a web service that uses a database software is a user of the database software
  • how that database software could prominently advertise the user its source code
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re: scorching foss take
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@charlotte My understanding is that the advertisement requirements apply to the "product" as a whole, so if a website + AGPL database was the "product" the website would be responsible for prominently displaying the license/repository information.

If the "product" was just a database or other web service providing data with no user interface (such as via Rest API) then including the license/repository information in some (to be) standardized location or in the return for the root API path would likely be enough to successfully argue compliance.

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re: scorching foss take
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actually how does AGPL work together with federated services like the fediverse? I am handling the data of other instanceā€™s users, that means that they are kind of using my patched version of akkoma (which they arenā€™t prominently advertised the source code of)

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re: scorching foss take
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@crumbcake it says ā€œprogramā€ where ā€œprogramā€ is the software licensed under the AGPL license

The whole section is extremely vague about this, itā€™s unclear what exactly counts as ā€œinteraction through a computer networkā€ (basically my questions above)

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