For the record, I think mediagoblin should use whatever license they see fit.

But the distinction between GPL and AGPL here matters. If mediagoblin were GPL you could use it to host better-than-youtube.com -- and subsequently add a hardware-accelerated-3d-folksonomy feature to your better-than-youtube.com instance. better-than-youtube.com's users would be [effectively] using a work derived from mediagoblin and yet they would not have access to its source because they were never distributed the binary. GNU created the AGPL to solve the problem created by the trend of "Software-as-a-service".

If you look at some of the installations listed in the wiki they have clearly been modified. They do not provide their modifications publicly, and are in violation of section 5. This is the core challenge with user modified agpl over user modified gpl. These users are unwittingly in violation - their acceptance of the license terms without understanding them leaving them in a position of legal risk.

The whole GPL family has no requirement of providing source publicly. The requirement is to make source available upon request to those who are the recipients of the software.

> they have clearly been modified

How do you know? Mediagoblin has lots of settings and prefs to adapt how it works.

Anyway, the source-provision applies whether or not it's modified. It's the responsibility of any instance of Mediagoblin to provide source upon request to visitors of the instance. The source must match what is running. Modified or not is irrelevant.

> unwittingly in violation

Not at all. They will be in violation if you can access their instance and you ask them for the source and they refuse to give it to you.

Look at them.

6c does not apply. No such offer was made, nor were the preconditions met.

6d is the only option that applies, and while those copies had the standard links to upstream, they had no links to downstream.

See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AnonFTPAndSendSour... and what follows it if you're not willing to read the license.

I'm sorry, you're right. I should have been more clear. The violation comes if there is not a notice to visitors that the software is AGPL and instructing them how to get the source. I didn't check the links in question, but I had the impression it could be okay enough for an instance to just link back to the original Media Goblin project where source is if they haven't modified anything. IANAL

Also, I don't seem to be able to edit my problematic reply above (which is correct in some regards, not so much in others). But thanks for clarifying here. I regret spreading some misunderstandings.