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Comment by phoronixrly

3 months ago

It is also useful to remember that MinIO has historically held to an absurd interpretation of the AGPL -- that it spreads (again, according to them) to software that communicates with MinIO via the REST API/CLI.

I assume forks, and software that uses them will be held to the same requirements.

As long as I'm not the one who gets sued over this, I think it would be wonderful to have some case law on what constitutes an AGPL derivative work. It could be a great thing for free software, since people seem to be too scared to touch the AGPL at all right now.

I thought that literally was the point of AGPL. If not, what's the difference between it and GPL3?

  • AGPL changes what it means to "distribute" the software. With GPL, sending copies of the software to users is distribution. With AGPL, if the users can access it over network, it's distribution. The implication is that if you run a custom version of MinIO, you need to open source it.