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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

The GPL kinda-sorta does. I guess it depends on your definition of "contribute back." People that derive from GPL source have to release those changes to the public, which could just be a zip archive on their web-site rather than a git pull request.

I guess what I mean is, the company can try to be as unhelpful as possible (e.g. strip comments, place all code into a giant .cpp file, etc) but it does technically have to publish source code regardless.

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The GPL requires you to distribute source code in addition to binaries. If you don't distribute binaries (i.e. if you're running the code on your server farm only), then you don't have to distribute anything.

That is why some choose to license their work under AGPL.

And that's why some stay away from AGPL licensed projects.

If you work for a bigger organization these licenses are banned for a good reason. There are some companies who are a little bit too relaxed with this ban (like VMWare) and you can see the results. I know for fact that some of the big guys take licensing very seriously and there are licenses that are approved for use while others are banned. The want to make sure there is no surprise down the road.

That still only goes so far, though. If you're building a product on top of a database that's licensed with the AGPL, like Mongo, you have to distribute those changes.* If you build your Intranet site on Mongo, though, you don't need to distribute those changes in a way that gets back to upstream.

* I think. And I don't know if this has withstood the sort of court scrutiny the GPL has.

For the intranet site, I think you'd still need to make the source code available to users, who could then make the source publicly available.

IANAL, though, so I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL.

>I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL

Section 10 of both the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 prevent the imposition of "further restrictions" on the subject of the license.

I'm aware. What's not clear is whether applies to the individual components of an organization (i.e. its employees) or just the organization as a whole. I want to think the answer is that intra-organizational distribution still counts as distribution (and therefore cannot be restricted), but usually it's considered acceptable to use a modified version of (A)GPL'd software internally (i.e. not used outside the organization) without it counting as "distribution", so things are kind of fuzzy without explicit terms in that regard.

Such are the side-effects of treating organizations as singular entities :)

As far as I know mongo think they have solved this by providing dricers under a different licence.

Again, AFAIK, this licencing (AGPL + MIT/BSD or Apache) has not been tested in court.

And that would make no change for things like OSs.

If OpenBSD was AGPL and my ISP used it on all its network hardware with some custom modification, they still wouldn't be forced to contribute back those changes.

We need to stop making licences that attempt to force people to do the right thing, and start educating people to do the write thing out of free will.

> People that derive from GPL source have to release those changes to the public

This is entirely not true. If I take a GPLed application, download it, modify it, and never distribute it, then I am under no obligation to release the source.

People that derive from GPL source have to release those changes to the public

No, only to the people who have received binaries of those derivations.

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