No, it means if you run Lemmy as a service and make modifications to it, you have to release your modifications back with the same license. Otherwise you couldn’t use a browser that’s not AGPL and read pages running on top of an AGPL server.
What AGPL is really good at is how nobody can take Lemmy, run a proprietary service and add incompatible features without giving them back to the community. So nobody can fork Lemmy, create a new VC-backed Reddit clone and start making incompatible changes to the source without the main project getting the source code.
Unfortunately it’s still possible to rewrite a VC-backed clone and start making incompatible changes. Think about Facebook’s “threads.net”. They sure did not take Lemmy source code.
Threads isn’t a Lemmy server, it’s a proprietary platform that happens to “speak” ActivityPub.
Yeah sorry, confused things. It’s comes closer to a Mastodon thing. The point is that a big corporation like Facebook does not need to use AGPL code as long as they can just re-implement it. Compared to the total codebase used at Facebook, re-implementing something like lemmy or mastodon does not sound like a big deal. (That’s not an argument against using the AGPL)
And speaking AP doesn’t necessarily make anything else compatible either, think reading Mastodon from Lemmy. The only thing guaranteed to work with no incompatibilities is other instances of the same platform. Mastodon doesn’t have quote posts, some other platforms do, they are interoperable with Mastodon but it still doesn’t get quote posts. Kbin and Lemmy used to have incompatible upvotes. This is one of the reasons Diaspora has given for not adding ActivityPub, the user experience when connecting to any other service is unpredictable.
You just have to be very careful to not have your developers to get even close to the AGPL source code, because if it’s similar, there’s a possibility the judge says you copied the AGPL code and now your license is AGPL too. There’s a reason companies are really scared about everything related to the license…
But yes, this happens and you have to have resources to fight it. Which is not easy.
Sadly, the more realistic option is that the judge dismisses the complaint because they don’t understand open source.
Happens sadly quite often.
Or it never encounters a judge because the author of the open source project doesn’t have the money to fight a megacorp in a court.
No. Clients communicate with the servers, but do not necessarily use their code - just the output, which isn’t inherently covered by the license.
Okay, thank you
Correct.
No, but Jerboa is also AGPL-licensed, Thunder is under MIT and Liftoff under GPL
