Comment by xoa
3 years ago
Not a lawyer and this is an area where I genuinely just don't know, so I'd love to find a place that's explored this and could read more. But WEKA's statement #2 about the irrevocability struck me as odd in its expansiveness. My understand was that "irrevocable" essentially is about arbitrariness and time, that so long as the licensee follows the governing license as written then it continues indefinitely and the licensor may not ever simply decide to revoke it. But if the license terms were broken, then could the copyright holder then say the contract was broken? I didn't think "irrevocable" meant "every other aspect of this contract doesn't matter beyond damages because even if you blow off them all it can't be revoked anyway". Like if I signed a copyright license saying "in exchange for $50/year paid on Jan 1 each year for a period of 10 years I grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable copyright license to said work" and then they just stop paying after the first year does that mean the license is still irrevocable, but I can sue them for damages? Or is the contract done due to non-performance? Or would that depend on other clauses? What if the value exchange is more of a quid pro quo thing, does that became a rare instance where suit for specific performance would be an option, or would the court translate it to money?
Just really curious, I've seen that term language lots and never really gave it much thought until now. Surely this must have been fought over before. But I'd have expected a lawyer drafted response by WEKA to cite case law and any governing state/national law. Just saying "see the contract says irrevocable so that's that duh!" feels kinda odd.
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Edit: Also to be clear, this is all purely dependent on any license terms actually having been broken. If none were then yes that'd be that. It just seemed like WEKA was making an argument that MinIO couldn't revoke no matter what.
I think the overarching point is that MinIO doesn't understand their own license. MinIO can't retaliate at will, except by suing. It also shows that - as it has been since the inception of the AGPL - nobody knows what the actual obligations are. MinIO seems to believe that interaction with MinIO, including calling the API, makes your code subject to the AGPL too. They say as much on their compliance page.[1] This is the opposite view of someone like MongoDB, who used to have their software AGPL licensed, but explicitly made their clients permissively licensed, because their expectation from the AGPL was that it is not infectious across process boundaries.
MinIO has taken this to other extremes, including believing that your config file for MinIO is subject to AGPL. Even if you assume that an implicit dependence on an API is making the calling code AGPL, MinIO has the least strong claim for their service being infectious, because their API is mostly a reimplementation of S3.
This is like the "are Java APIs copyrightable" case all over again, except the people who are threatening legal action didn't even invent the API.
[1]: https://min.io/compliance
"When MinIO is linked to a larger software stack in any form, including statically, dynamically, pipes, or containerized and invoked remotely, the AGPL v3 applies to your use. What triggers the AGPL v3 obligations is the exchanging data between the larger stack and MinIO."
I read through this as well & it is a joke. Under their interpretation if I run MinIO in the Linux subsystem that is part of Windows, I'd need to open source that.
Their interpretation is so extreme that using a browser would require me to open source the browser. If I used a shell script to test if the service is running, I'd need to make that open source too.
There is also this: "Passing configuration parameters to a MinIO binary instance constitutes making a modified version, as it does not produce an exact binary copy."
How do they know it doesn't produce an exact binary copy? Maybe my x86 computer is quantum based.
I'm pretty sure if I compiled MinIO with a proprietary Golang implementation, MinIO would want me to open source the compiler.
They also include their trademarked logo in the git repo., then try and tack on a supplemental policy about that later. Which you can't do, because the AGPL grants you a license to the logo.
In MinIO's original accusations, they have a line: "MinIO recommends uninstalling $Company entirely from your infrastructure."
When they wrote it, they set $Company to "Weka". Given the overall interaction and beyond-curious legal interpretations they are making and publishing, I read it with $Company set to "MinIO".
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It might be the actual intent of the AGPL, which is why I completely stopped using it despite loving the spirit of how it is used by MongoDB.
The FSF has an example of how to comply with the AGPL (specifically the "prominent notice") when using an AGPL licensed proxy that is pretty illuminating. They recommend you just show a landing page with a big reference to the AGPL on the first request. I'd like to see them do that with an API Gateway.
I would interpret the Apache Licenses terms on breaking the license to apply to patents and there it is pretty clear that the party who starts litigation loses their own license. I don't think any open source license writer would intentionally want the situation where a middle-man causes a license to never be valid, and in this case it makes no sense as attribution is meant to be optional information.