Our application currently has a licence which is not compatible with AGPL. We need to use a library licensed under AGPL (currently the best one for the job and the client would like us to use it).
We thought about creating a web service using this library and we would license it under AGPL. Our application would directly depend on it to function properly. We wanted to create two svn repositories, one for the main project and one for the web service AGPL. To install our application, one would need to retrieve the code from both repositories, compile and run the applications.
Does that count as a derivative work? Both source codes are open and publicly available. The main project needs to keep its license and cannot be licensed under AGPL.
The web service can work as-is. One can just use it without the other project, it is just kind of useless since the web service validates metadata with rules only valid for the main project. The web service has default config files valid only for the main project but they can all be replaced by something completely unrelated. The main problem is that the web service contains default files which make me think that it is potentially a derivative work and if my main project uses this web service, it will be forced to be AGPL to be able to use the web service.
Maybe that makes a different but the library AGPL is only used and not changed.
Does anybody have an idea if I can use this AGPL web service and keep my license on the main project? If that's not the case, I will need to create another web service with a compatible license and keep the AGPL web service for internal use only.