Proxmox AGPL question

[OpenTokix]

Our organisation is considering Proxmox for VM orchestration, but we have stakeholders that are worried about AGPL. Specifically how AGPL might require us to release internal source code public. Can we please get some guidance?

Three or more proxmox hypervisors running an unmodified proxmox VE 6.1+ in one datacenter. Used for internal VMs and LXC Containers running: web servers, kubernetes-clusters, ldap-servers and in house developed software.

The proxmox cluster(s) is not available for any entity outside the company, we do not provide a PaaS based on proxmox. We are running internal and public services in VMs orchestrated by Proxmox. We do not provide VMs to customers, everything is for our own services only.

We will interact with proxmox through the provided API with our own ansible playbooks to spin up and shut down VMs and containers.

Will our ansible code and automation be affected by the AGPL license?

 

[t.lamprecht]

Will our ansible code and automation be affected by the AGPL license?

No, you need to make changes available for modifiactions to any part of the Proxmox VE project, but as long as you only interface with Proxmox VE's unmodified API that part is fine to be proprietary.
Else, using the PVE webinterface with an proprietary Internet Browser like Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome (not Chromium) would also require the provider of those tools to release their software under AGPL - but that isn't the case.

If you "link" with internal parts of PVE directly, i.e., use our perl modules directly in another perl module you must provide that code under AGPL. If you call to a CLI command or access the API you don't.

The relevant parts of the AGPL regarding this would be:

To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a "modified version" of the earlier work or a work "based on" the earlier work.

-- 0. Definitions

This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program

-- 2. Basic Permissions

In short, as long as you only run our programs as is, but dot not modify them in any way or include their code in programs of yours directly you do not need to disclose that at all.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

 

[OpenTokix]

Thank you for the good answer. Now we can continue with our proxmox deployment.