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My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

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932 points sohzm | 1 comments | 04 Jul 25 02:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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hcfman ◴[04 Jul 25 07:26 UTC] No.44462022[source]▶
Doesn't this happen all the time with Ultralytics yolo code? They use an AGPL license, which to my understand means that anything that links with this code also becomes AGPL.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but is the license also viral if there's a network connection involved? i.e. I run the code in a container with a little network interface added ?

And yet Microsoft have release code with different licenses that make's use of Ultralytics code.

I potentially would be interested in using these wildlife detection models in a commercial (Not open source) context but simply don't trust the claim that it would be okay to do so, sounds like a big business risk to me.

What is the opinion of the community of the MIT licenses associated with PyTorch wildlife from Microsoft okay to use in a closed source commercial context? Microsoft have put an MIT license on this, but their code does imports of ultralytics libraries, which I thought were AGPL.

Note: The GPL 3 license from the official yolov9 differs in this, it must be possible to run the same code on the platform, but your usage may be closed source.

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1. ahtihn ◴[04 Jul 25 12:55 UTC] No.44464102[source]▶
> They use an AGPL license, which to my understand means that anything that links with this code also becomes AGPL.

It doesn't work like that.

The code linking with AGPL code needs to be AGPL (or compatible license) to comply with the license.

That doesn't mean that if you link some code with AGPL code it automatically becomes AGPL. It just means it doesn't comply with the license and therefore does not have the right to use the AGPL code.

The remedy to a license violation is not necessarily complying with it. In fact, I've never seen a case where a company using (A)GPL code in such a way was ordered to release their own code with that license. Generally, they have to simply remove the (A)GPL code, pay some damages and that's it. If they want to keep using the AGPL code, then they of course would have to comply with it, but that's their decision at that point.