My reading is that there is no requirement for batch processing at all. As long as the software itself (as defined by the usual viral GPL linking rules) does not support something that can be interpreted as "network interaction", you can wrap it however you want into a network app, and the license has absolutely no effect on you because, as designed and implemented, and unlike most believe, it's a pure copyright license and cannot control what you do with the software (even though the FSF would love to make everyone believe otherwise, since otherwise they'd realize how broken it is).
In practice, of course, the AGPL wording of "supporting remote interaction through a computer network" is hilariously vague and broken, and completely untested in court, so who knows what that means. Is an app that does standard stdin/out processing considered to "support" network interaction because you can plug it into a bog-standard inetd? Does an X11 GUI app support "network interaction" since the X11 protocol does? What about Wayland, does the existence of waypipe change anything? Does the existence of ssh mean that any command-line app counts as supporting network interaction? And how is this any different for, say, a Python WSGI web-app, which in fact cannot support network interaction on its own without a supporting WSGI web server?
No matter how you slice (heh) the answer to these questions, AGPL falls flat by either completely failing to protect anything by allowing endless workarounds to the networking requirement (on one end), or by requiring even the simplest of apps to have functional and always up-to-date source offers for all user (or even non-user) interaction, thereby making vast amounts of AGPL software out of compliance if they have more than one contributor (on the other).
https://mastodon.social/users/flameeyes/statuses/113615102604995311
https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/113618858957482463
https://mastodon.social/users/flameeyes/statuses/113615102604995311
@marcan I’ve never understood why people who license their software as AGPL don’t have a built in network-accessible “quine” command that dumps the source. I don’t like the license, but if […]
@marcan
Don't forget the elephant behind the curtain. Enforcement.
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@marcan "or by requiring even the simplest of apps to have functional and always up-to-date source offers for all interaction, thereby making vast amounts of AGPL software out of […]
2024-12-08 marcan ┃ edited ┃ 2💬
Practical AGPL reminder: You are safe as long as you do not contribute to or modify AGPLed software, and as long as you don't use Gentoo or other source-based distros. As long as you follow […]
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