Let’s say B makes the service to users, and pays A to develop the software.
There’s some subtlety in whether B is paying A as a contract, or buying software, or even just getting it for free as part of a bigger contract—it would come down to a judge to really decide. It might be that nobody is violating, it might be that B is violating. It’s hard to see how A could be violating, as long as they didn’t remove any required upstream capabilities and delivered the source to B.
Why would the software be dropped from use?
Because the risk of lawsuit would be massively increased, by there being an ACTUAL lawsuit happening.
If someone had, say, offered MongoDB-as-a-service with this model during the time when Mongo was hot, my expectation is they would have had many customers.
Mongo didn’t, as far as I know, pursue any AGPL violations. There were a LOT of mongo hosting services around, none very successful, and none, AFAIK, that were making improvements to Mongo—AFAIK, they just distributed the Mongo source when asked, mostly ignoring the viral part of the license. It’s impossible to know whether that was because of AGPL or because people with that expertise used it to improve private instances that their lawyers said didn’t trigger AGPL.
There’s some subtlety in whether B is paying A as a contract, or buying software, or even just getting it for free as part of a bigger contract—it would come down to a judge to really decide. It might be that nobody is violating, it might be that B is violating. It’s hard to see how A could be violating, as long as they didn’t remove any required upstream capabilities and delivered the source to B.
Because the risk of lawsuit would be massively increased, by there being an ACTUAL lawsuit happening.
Mongo didn’t, as far as I know, pursue any AGPL violations. There were a LOT of mongo hosting services around, none very successful, and none, AFAIK, that were making improvements to Mongo—AFAIK, they just distributed the Mongo source when asked, mostly ignoring the viral part of the license. It’s impossible to know whether that was because of AGPL or because people with that expertise used it to improve private instances that their lawyers said didn’t trigger AGPL.