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Last month, Square a financial services and mobile payment company updated its terms of service effective from this year in July. Developers are raising concerns upon one of the terms of service which restricts the use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores.

What is GNU AGPL Affero General Public License

The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is a free and copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. AGPL guarantees the freedom for sharing and changing all versions of a program. It protects developers’ right by asserting copyright on the software, and by giving legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.

What does the developer community think about AGPL

The Content Restrictions section B-15  under the Online Store, reads, “You will not use, under any circumstance, any open source software subject to the GNU Affero General Public License v.3, or greater.”

Few of the developers think that Square has misunderstood AGPL and this rule doesn’t make sense to them. A user commented on HackerNews, “This makes absolutely no sense. I’m almost certain that Square lawyers fucked up big time. They looked at the AGPL and completely misunderstood the context. There is no way in hell anyone can interpret AGPL in a way that makes Square responsible for any license violations their customers make selling software.”

While according to few others the code which is licensed under AGPL can’t be used in a website hosted by Square, is what the rule means. Also, if the AGPL code is used by Square then the code might be sent to the browsers along with Square’s own proprietary code. And this could possibly mean that Square has violated AGPL.

But a lot of companies follow the same rule, including Google, which clearly states, “WARNING: Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MAY NOT be used at Google.”  But this could be useful for the developers as it keeps the code safe from the big tech companies using it.

Chris DiBona, Director of open source at Google, said in a statement to The Register that “Google continues to ban the lightning-rod AGPL open source license within the company because doing so “saves engineering time” and because most AGPL projects are of no use to the company.”

According to him, AGPL is designed for closing the “application service provider loophole” in the GPL and which lets ASPs use GPL code without distributing their changes back to the open source community. Under the AGPL, one has to open source their code if they use the AGPL code in their web service, and why would a company like Google do that? As its core components and back-end infrastructure that run its online services are not open source.

But it also seems that it is something that needs the interference of lawyers and it is a matter of concern for them as well.

Also, the websites using AGPL code might have to provide the entire source code to their back end system. So, few think that AGPL is not an efficient license and they would want to see a better one that goes with the idea of freedom completely. And according to them such licenses should come from copyleft folks and not from the profit-oriented companies.

While the rest argue that it is an efficient license and is useful for the developers and giving them enough freedom to share and protecting their software from companies.

To know more about this news, check out the post by Square.

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Amrata Joshi