to:	licensing@fsf.org

date:	Nov 5, 2020, 8:49 PM

subject:	GPL & AGPL questions

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Hi there, 

I hope you're doing well! I have a few questions about a codebase that I work in, that I was hoping you could answer for me. 

I work on a well-established game server project that has historically been GPL3 throughout, and that has always been well understood and easy to follow. There has been a shift recently where a lot of people in our community want to start shifting towards using AGPL3, to "activate" the open-source-ness of the codebase from downstream users.

Given the age of the project, isn't possible for us to just relicense all of the existing work, so our only option is a progressive relicensing through the project being rewritten. 

- Do all modifications to a GPL work always have to be GPL? Or can individual modifications be under a compatible license? Can any modification to the GPL work be licensed under the AGPL?
- What modifications are allowed to be AGPL? Are non-trivial changes to lines and sections in a GPL file allowed to be AGPL? Or does the whole file have to be modified/rewritten?
- What counts as a modification? Am I correct in my thinking that "It wouldn't be considered a modification of a GPL work if what you're adding could stand by itself in a separate GitHub repository"?
- If I have a base class and then inherit from it, is the new child class allowed to be AGPL, if it is otherwise entirely written from scratch?
- Am I allowed to make a brand new source and header files AGPL, even if they are compiled and linked to otherwise GPL content?
- If I have a scripting language, which calls out to bindings written in GPL code, can those scripts be AGPL?

And finally, is it alright for me to host the body of your reply in a wiki or similar, or should I paraphrase?

Thanks for your time, I really appreciate the work you guys do!

Cheers,

Zach