Comment by levkk

9 months ago

No. If you're using it internally though, there are no issues. You don't have to share anything. If you're using it externally, e.g. building a PgDog cloud service, you'll need to share any changes you make to PgDog _only_.

> If you're using it internally though, there are no issues.

Unfortunately this advice is incompatible with that of most legal departments.

I get that this is your interpretation, by your interpretation doesn't have any value when it comes to possible IP issues.

  • No issues. PgDog is a company, email me if you want to use it internally and we'll work it out.

    lev@pgdog.dev

    • Sorry to harp on this point that isn't fun performance engineering, but I think the tricky bit comes in exactly where you draw the line.

      Is offering Postgres-as-a-service with PgDog under the hood okay?

      What about a document-oriented, Firebase-equivalent that has PgDog and Postgres under the hood?

      What about a low-code application development platform?

      What about all of the above, but internal-facing vs paying-customer facing? Does it matter if the internal-facing is paid for via a cross-charge rate (e.g. a multinational company that charges divisions in other countries for services)?

      Does a customer of all of the above services have to AGPL their code and release it publically?

      Maybe it's all obvious, but that is the sort of thing I worry about with AGPL commercially. Even though I love OSS.

      7 replies →

  • > Unfortunately this advice is incompatible with that of most legal departments.

    I see this comment pop up every now and then on HN in specific, but I've never personally had a lawyer tell me this; is there any chance anyone could share an actual example of this?

    • Well in all large orgs legal has rules which licenses are allowed for dependencies generally it's MIT, Apache, BSD and the like

    • I worked in a large org with 100,000+ employees. You could just use software with pre-approved licences and I am 99% sure AGPL wasn't one of them.

      1 reply →