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Defusing AGPL-3 with Batch Processing

Preamble: this is an intentionally incendiary post, you could even define it as trolling. I have been thinking…

The “network interaction” part was definitely intended to refer to web applications, but it does work for a few other cases — back when I had a more radical stance on Free Software(currently, it’s more nuanced), I have actually released rbot plugins under AGPL-3, and made sure that they included an info command that would point at the repository with the source code. On the other hand, aside from the original intention, AGPL-3 had possibly unintentional side effects, which were already covered by Armin Ronacher over ten years ago: the somewhat significant restrictions applied by AGPL-3 are very much asymmetric for projects where a commercial entity has full copyright control — just like GPL would be for embedded libraries. Technically, you could probably use a similar setup to put a 3D printing slicer online: you would want to have the web application take a set of parameters, and then run the slicing as a background batch job, informing the users when the files are ready for them to collect.

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