> AGPL isn’t battle tested enough for me to be confident it will protect against big tech doing big tech things like spinning off a separate company in Ireland to firewall AGPL software.

What does it matter if they do? The point of the AGPL is that if you make a version available to users over the network, either you release the source to your version or you can't use it. That subsidiary could still be made to release the source or stop using it. Wouldn't that be "mission accomplished?"

Not exactly. If you're not modifying your version you don't need to make the source available to server users. So if you contract out the modifications, and they only give the source to you, and you give the source to nobody...

I don't know if that scheme would work but I think "not battle tested enough" is valid.

Also there's some weirdness in how the availability requirement applies at the time of editing that gives me questions, but I'm far from an expert there.

Thanks. I hadn't followed that concern.

I think a plain read of the license would make it clear that the "distribution" obligation occurs when you make it available on the network to your users (regardless of whether you modified it yourself or paid a contractor to do so), but I'm not a lawyer, so sometimes what looks like plain text to me can have a specific meaning that doesn't make sense to me.

Well the wording is "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer[...]"

Starting with no trickery, there's a lot of circumstances where you could buy software from a vendor and confidently declare you didn't modify it. And that should be true even if you ask for certain features just for you. So there's probably a way to make the separation work.

I think that the contractor would be required to change the software to include a notice, and if you removed it you would be modifying the software again. I suspect a judge would not look kindly on such shenanigans in any case.

My view is that if Amazon or Apple lawyers thought they could bypass the AGPL that easily, they would've done it already (just look at the stuff NVIDIA does to pretend that it's not flagrantly violating the GPL).

You can't change the code to remove the notice, but you could let the link expire. Or the frontend server, while adding your own branding, might remove the notice the backend added.

> I suspect a judge would not look kindly on such shenanigans in any case.

I completely agree there, but they still need to find the license clause sufficiently correct and in scope if they want to throw the book at you.

Why do you need it to be battle tested when you already know that that is allowed?

You're also forgetting that even if it was illegal, setting up a shell company in a foreign country means the shell company will be able to get away with a lot of outright illegal stuff.

Chinese tech companies can just take your code with no recourse.