RuDesktop, the AGPL, and an epic pile of drama

The client side of RuDesktop is derived from RustDesk. For a while we didn't publish the source. Partly because nobody had actually asked for it, and partly because of some tricky legal questions around RustDesk's own third-party dependencies.

We took advantage of the fact that the AGPL requires you to give the source code to anyone who receives or interacts with the program, but doesn't require publishing it to the whole world (a detail a lot of people miss). So we just quietly kept building our product.

Today, though, I stumbled onto an absolutely epic amount of drama that had blown up around this. So I had to get off my ass and push the derived part public to put everyone at ease.

For anyone curious, here's the code, and here's the drama.