May I use AGPL license in a desktop application without providing the source code?
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We develop a commercial desktop application that uses an AGPL library. The lib's code is just used, not modified. Our application runs completely offline. May we use the AGPL library without havi...

I know this feels like an odd example, but I had heard one reason to favor GPL over AGPL is because GPL has been upheld so often in court. Here is an example of AGPL working as intended though.

  •  The_Terrible_Humbaba   ( @The_Terrible_Humbaba@beehaw.org ) English
    3•1 year ago

    Because the philosophy behind the two things is essentially the same.

    Here’s a text about FOSS that someone shared some days ago, which should help to understand it.

    Here’s a “summary”, through some quotes:

    The Free Software movement has been mostly killed by the corporate Open Source. (…)

    [RMS] also foresaw that if we were not the master of our software, we would quickly become the slave of the machines controlled by soulless corporations. (…)

    RMS theorised the need for the “four freedoms of software”.

    • The right to use the software at your discretion

    • The right to study the software

    • The right to modify the software

    • The right to share the software, including the modified version

    How to guarantee those freedoms ? RMS invented copyleft. A solution he implemented in the GPL license. (…)

    It is about creating and maintaining commons. Commons resources that everybody could access freely, resources that would be maintained by the community at large. (…)

    Capitalist businesses were, obviously, against copyleft. And still are. Steve Ballmer famously called the GPL a “cancer”. (…)

    Business-compatible licenses like BSD/MIT or even public domain are “Free Software” because they respect the four freedoms.

    But they can be privatised.

    And that’s the whole point. For the last 30 years, businesses and proponents of Open Source, including Linus Torvalds, have been decrying the GPL because of the essential right of “doing business” aka “privatising the common”.(…)

    Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. (…)

    We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. (…)