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Comment by jascii | Hacker News Reader

Fud. To quote section 13 of the AGPL license: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License."

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Sounds like generic copyright feature, when you assign license on per file basis in source form. Such compiled combined work will be licensed under AGPL:

13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such.

"but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such."

I'm not sure where you got this, but that phrasing is not part of the AGPL license as posted on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

It's from GPL3.

AGPL Section 13 as you quote it discussed the interaction of AGPL and GPL v3. It has nothing to do with the scenario the parent commenter was discussing involving the interaction of AGPL and closed-source non-GPL code.

Well, does that allow you to have the rest of your backend GPL licensed and simply not distributed? Nobody has a right to see the code unless they have the executable, and you're not giving anyone the executable, so...

Kind of unfortunate if there's a leak though.

A leak of an executable doesn't imply a requirement to provide source anymore than a theft implies a warranty.

I meant a leak of the source code, not the executable. If the source code comes with a license that was intentionally applied by the copyright holder, does it matter that it wasn't intended to be released if the license allows for general use?

If I make changes to a GPL3 library, but never distribute it, and you come along and leak it, you've distributed my changes without a license. Those changes are toxic, and the result cannot be distributed by anyone. It's not really any different than the usual dance one has to perform to combine two components with incompatible licenses: you can mix the ingredients yourself, you can tell people how to mix the ingredients themselves, but you can't distribute the cake.

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