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Cannot be helped - that's just fear of the unknown.

If legal is familiar with AGPL, like they are with GPL, BSD or Apache, they should see no issue. This change does not really affect anyone except for the very small number of people/companies that make their own changes to software and make this software available online to others.

If you aren't such a company and legal would still say you guys can't use e.g. Grafana anymore... the truth will be that it's some incompetent (or severely underhanded, where they can't do any research and err on the side of caution) legal department, failing at their jobs.




Many devs at Google routinely use GPLv3 code, in GNU Emacs, to make an example.

Unless you’re repackaging Grafana into an app bundle for customers to use, there’s no violation occurring here, right?


GPL and AGPL are very different here.

If a developer uses GPL Emacs to write a server that uses GPL libraries and Google runs that sever in their datacenter it is very clear that Google doesn't have to release any source code.

However Google's argument is that if they make a web application that uses AGPL MongoDB as a backend it is unclear if 1. The user is interacting with MongoDB over a network and 2. do they need to release the code of their server.

It appears that the answers are 1. Yes and 2. No but apparently Google isn't confident to use that in court. (Or at least they don't see enough benefits for that risk)




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