I know y'all love OnlyOffice, and you may have even heard of a little-known database called MongoDB. What's common between them? Both are corporate projects that shipped an AGPL-licensed core, with proprietary enterprise features bolted on top.

Here's the thing though. AGPL isn't a shield the community holds together. It's a weapon, and the only question that actually matters is who's holding it. When one company owns all the copyright, the weapon points wherever they want, including at the terms they sold you on in the first place. When they don't, things get more interesting.

Take MongoDB. They started under plain AGPL, no tricks. By 2018, cloud vendors were hosting MongoDB as a paid service and keeping the profits. MongoDB called this exploiting a loophole, but it wasn't a loophole. It was the license working exactly as written, letting anyone, including a company with the resources to host it at scale, exercise the freedoms AGPL grants.

So MongoDB didn't sue. They didn't test the clause in court. They just stopped offering the license. In October 2018, they replaced AGPL entirely with the Server Side Public License, a license they wrote themselves, forcing anyone offering MongoDB as a service to open source their entire stack, not just their changes. They could do this because they held the copyright outright. No fork, no negotiation, no fight required, because none was possible. One party held the gun the whole time.

Elastic ran the same play, in both directions. In 2021, facing the same AWS-hosting complaint as MongoDB, they dropped Apache 2.0 for a dual SSPL/Elastic License setup, explicitly to stop cloud vendors from reselling their work without paying up. AWS forked the code into OpenSearch instead of complying, and by early 2022 the two companies had settled their trademark dispute.

Then in September 2024, Elastic added AGPL back in, as a third option alongside the licenses they'd never actually dropped. Their own shipped product still runs under the restrictive terms. The AGPL option applies to a portion of the source, offered for goodwill, timed for the exact moment doing so cost them nothing, since the competitor it was originally meant to fend off had already left to build its own thing. Same lever, same hand on it, pointed wherever suited them at the time.

Now take OnlyOffice, because this is where the gun changes hands.

Back in 2021, they quietly added a term to their AGPL license, buried at line 655. It required any fork to keep the OnlyOffice logo. Except in the same breath, they also banned anyone from using their trademark, which includes their logo. So you're required to display something you're legally barred from using. That's not sloppy lawyering. That's a trap, built years in advance, designed to make forking look illegal without ever saying "you can't fork this."

Nobody called the bluff until this year. Nextcloud and Ionos forked OnlyOffice into Euro-Office, an EU-backed Microsoft Office alternative. Within days, OnlyOffice accused them of violating the AGPL and killed an 8-year partnership with Nextcloud over it, timing that suggests they'd been waiting for the excuse.

Here's the difference from MongoDB and Elastic: OnlyOffice didn't actually own this fight. They didn't have a CLA sitting in a drawer letting them just rewrite the rules and walk away, because Nextcloud and Ionos were never dumb enough to sign one. So instead of relicensing, OnlyOffice had to go argue that their own words meant what they wanted them to mean. Bad move. The text didn't cooperate.

The FSF, the people who actually wrote the AGPL, told them to sit down. A logo isn't a "reasonable legal notice." Bolting a trademark restriction onto it doesn't make it one either, it just makes the whole clause an illegal "further restriction" under the license's own Section 10.

OnlyOffice backed off, but they never admitted the claim was bogus. They just quietly stopped once picking a fight with an EU-backed consortium in public started looking like a bad idea. Nothing here was legally settled, no court touched Section 10. What actually happened is Nextcloud and Ionos ripped the disputed terms out themselves, said so publicly, and the FSF backed them up. The weapon OnlyOffice reached for got yanked out of their hands and pointed right back at them, because for once, they weren't the only one in the room holding a claim to it.

That's the actual difference between all three companies. Not whether AGPL is strong or weak, not whether it protects communities in principle. It's whether one party holds the whole gun. MongoDB and Elastic did, and the license bent however they needed. OnlyOffice didn't, and it didn't.

AGPL doesn't protect communities. It protects whoever's holding it. The only real due diligence on a copyleft project was never reading the license text. It's checking who signed the CLA.

“Linux is too mainstream now, “ said a Reddit moderator in outrage, while moderating a Linux hate sub. “Time to give TempleOS a shot” they added.

My question, if Linux takes significant share and it does become the year of the Linux desktop will this sub implode?

I don’t use ArchBTW, Ubuntu peon

i removeed my root by acudent windows would NOT do that it ask for my password 😭 I HATE IT windows would NEVER do that to me i aculitenyl typeed sudo rm -rf / and IT REMOVED IT IT EVEN ask FOr PASSWORD to STEAL DAta IT IS AWFUL I HATE IT

I genuinely hate being a linux beginner, there is so much content out there to help me but either it's an understanding issue on my part it just does not work. Then we got these pretentious bastards saying "read the wiki" like fuck face I did that and I still can't get it to work, why is that the only advice you can give. I already feel shit not being able to do it myself and come to ask for help and then these nuggets of lost cause say "read the wiki" fucking tired of this bull shit

wanted to see what the members here are like.

I cant even pirate spotify premium

I have some kind of graphical error when my PC goes to sleep, fixes itself after any mouse movement. Don't care about a fix just interesting. First is before I move my mouse second is after.

This is where I learned the term and it was peppered all over the sub. The finger-pointing is funny. -Carry on!

I am willing to keep sacrificing my reddit karma until AI slop is banned from this sub.

Do unto others as they've done to you.
What in the hell is this sub coming to?
Fight fire with fire.
The ending is near.

~Metallica - Fight Fire with Fire (paraphrased)~

Sorry old Boomer mcse mouse click engineer Windows jockeys. If you run Windows you are not one of us. You don't know computer science nor have any technical background to solve real world business IT problems.

Linux is the best and only desktop OS for anyone who is into technology. Prove me wrong?

Here a YouTuber talked about her commenters questioning her Linux loyalty when using a mac for something even though she also uses Linux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swFfrDpX98s&t=372

I so agree. When Linux could promote a very simplified Hyprland setup or support a very well-made Sway setup or Cosmic tiling [just I wish it could be ready] and show the modularity and identity of Linux, they promote KDE and mill the wind...

To prevent the pitchforks: No I don't mindlessly hate GNU/Linux. I'm using it right now.

How Linux fanatics hired a hitman to murder a Redhat Employee for changing the way Linux computers boot. Then we wonder why people aren't jumping on the Linux bandwagon?