Comment by merb

well the problem is that some companies who use the AGPL do actually write some fud about it. i.e. if I use min.io agpl and the user never interacts with it, just my program, but I never even modified min.io and I just use the binary interface, I would never be subjected to the release my program's code, I would just need to give a link to the min.io source code that I used.

however every company thinks in its own way:

https://itextpdf.com/how-buy/agpl-license

> You may not deploy it on a network without disclosing the full source code of your own applications under the AGPL license. You must distribute all source code, including your own product and web-based applications.

and they also kinda fork the license with this text:

> When using iText 7 Community under AGPL, you must prominently mention iText and include the iText copyright and AGPL license in output file metadata, and also retain the producer line in every PDF that is created or manipulated using iText.

I mean this makes it really hard to trust the license at all, what would happen if I build a sever that can modify/create/convert pdfs and release the source code and than I have another program that calls this server internally with a http client, is that still some kind of linking or is it more like mongodb?

I would happily build something with agpl when I could use itext/ghostscript and build something like minio which could than be used behind the scenes, but if that is not possible or if it is a grey zone than I'm not sure if agpl is a cool license at all. every company who uses the agpl writes something different about it, thats why an "official" clarification would be really really cool.