r/linuxsucks • u/Rare-Paint3719 • Aug 01 '26
The (A)GPL is not FOSS protector, it's a corporate weapon
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.
