Do I need to license a Jupyter Notebook that uses a forked AGPL library?

Question

I used an AGPL-licensed library for a data study, and am hoping to release and link to a Jupyter Notebook with my methodology. I was hoping to learn what license, if any, I would need to include with my notebook.

Here's my situation:

1. The notebook imports a forked version of an AGPL tool (the fork only differs by three lines of code meant to catch an exception, which is currently an Open PR to the original repo.) This fork is in a repo separate from my notebook.
2. The notebook relies heavily on methods from the AGPL fork, but does not copy or modify source code from it.
3. The notebook will be published standalone, in its own/separate repo, with a comment linking to the forked repo above the relevant import statement in the notebook.

From what I understand, the AGPL fork automatically inherits the AGPL license from the original repo. But I then am unsure about what happens when I import this fork into a notebook and publish it.

If my notebook imports a fork of an AGPL library, but I don't make any changes or copy source code from the fork into my Jupyter notebook, can I release a notebook that imports/makes heavy use of this library without needing to license the notebook?

My end goal is to link to the notebook in a data study post on a company blog so readers can see my methodology. I just want to make sure I am correctly licensing my study/providing proper attribution for this AGPL tool.

Answer 1

I would consider a notebook as a combo of code and data.

As data, the notebook itself (assuming it does not include snippets of AGPL-licensed code) can be under whatever license you please.

As code, if executed it depends on your modified AGPL-licensed library that you make otherwise available.

Since you intent is to publish in some blog post, you are imho staying in the realm of data.

I would accompany the post with some comments explaining the dependency and its license if someone would want to reuse the code and its dependency for something else.