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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

FWIW the AGPL (which is a nonfree EULA trying to masquerade as a copyright license) has never been tested in court, so the fact that it is nonsensical has yet to actually be adjudicated.

Software and services aren’t the same, and the anticapitalist zealots at the FSF can’t square this circle no matter how hard they try.

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Generally, when you ask people who have any understanding of law, they respond, well, of course not. No one with any sanity at all would try and test the GPL in court. They know what's going to hold up.

I do believe that the GPL will eventually be broken. However, it won't be broken in ways such as happening now. It'll be broken when some company is able to show the court that they were doing a lot of things to ensure they weren't going to violate the GPL. And yet a rogue employee, unknown to the rest of the company, violated it despite being told not to. I don't know exactly what the courts will decide in this case. It's still going to come down to the copyright violation. However, it likely won't be a source code release. The GPL will hold up, they will just say the written requirements are to much and ??? . But again, this will only happen after the courts take a very detailed look at all the things the company is doing to ensure they didn't violate the GPL in the first place, which means we are likely looking at many, many years before the first such case. Anyone who isn't aware of the GPL and taking a lot of active effort to ensure they're not violating it, they won't be able to pull off this defense after the fact.

You're talking about the GPL though, OP was talking the AGPL

For this discussion it makes no difference.

It very much does, as this is a AGPL violation being discussed, not a GPL violation.

By "it doesn't make a difference" they meant that the argument applies equally for both, and if it fails for one it fails for both.

it literally makes no difference for the bambustsudio program you download. GPL has the same corresponding source clause

> And yet a rogue employee, unknown to the rest of the company, violated it despite being told not to. I don't know exactly what the courts will decide in this case. It's still going to come down to the copyright violation. However, it likely won't be a source code release.

I would expect a court to compell a defendant to either comply with the license or cease distribution and possibly pay damages for unauthorized distribution... But I don't know that there's a good way to figure the damages and US statuatory damages likely don't apply because who registers their copyrights for open source code (or deposits copies with the Library of Congress)?

Infringement by a rouge employee, acting against policy, may be reason to limit punitve damages and stick to actual damages... But if it's an actual rogue employee acting against policy, I would expect the company to cease infringement, begin compliance, or negotiate for an alternative solution once notified about the issue anyway.

I would expect that the defendant would already have stopped shipping anything that violates the license by the time it gets to court. However there is still the question of what the court will do about the part non compliance.

By contrast here the courts are likely to force bambu to open everything since they are knowingly not in compliance. Though China is what makes this hard- the courts can say open everything but if China resists there isn't much more they can do. (Blocking all sales is an option)

The person I am replying to is an obvious troll, but it is worth mentioning that there is very little to "test in court". Basic copyright law says that you cannot copy someone else's code and distribute software based thereon. *GPL* provides a workaround, provided that you follow the terms of the license. If a court were to invalidate all of AGPL, the default fallback would simply be that nobody is able to distribute the software.

Trolling requires subterfuge, in an effort to draw someone into a debate on false pretenses, so that they can be ridiculed for, as they say, eating the pasta.

My comment is and was completely sincere; I am not trolling. It legitimately boggles my mind how people read the text of the AGPL and don’t see that it’s plainly and obviously a EULA (which makes it nonfree).

I’ve even written about it before: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/

I am not a lawyer but I’m not sure if that fail-closed situation is how it would work; presumably some parts of it could be found to be invalid without invalidating the entire license? It’s not my field, I am just guessing.

Hating the people who made for AGPL for political reasons is not an argument

Yup. IP abolitionism it turns out is a sword that can slay yourself too. I support abolishing it even to the point of making all EULA unenforceable for good.

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