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Google Code Project Hosting relaxes license policy

googlecode.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Code Project Hosting relaxes license policy

#11

Post by durin42 »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
10ren wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Sorry, I deleted without refreshing to check for replies. Here's the original:] Aside: I'm curious if there are any OSI approved open source licenses that exclude server use. I ask, because the current move towards services defeats the purpose of the GPL (of allowing access to the code users depend on.)

That's one of the bigger paradoxes of the arrival of the internet. It more or less empowered open source, and then by having the browser as a client made it possible for companies to use open source internally and to build services exposed to end users on top of that open source that will never be released as open source. The 'affero GPL' attempts to cure this: http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html (and the current versio…

I'd recommend pretty strongly against the AGPL. I know it sounds good when you want to "screw $megacorp," but it actually has all sorts of legal wrinkles in it that make ensuring compliance almost impossible in some cases. The end result is that people paranoid about getting sued about license problems will just not use your code most of the time, and that feels like damage done to the community, not help.

Re: Google Code Project Hosting relaxes license policy

#12

Post by tzs »

shaddi wrote: post #9

Certainly a change of heart -- we were trying to host an AGPL project on Google Code in 2008 and were told to find a new host or face deletion. There was a discussion that got a bit heated in fact, with with Chris DiBona at one point calling the AGPL "deeply flawed". http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting/browse_th...

He's right that is is deeply flawed. In no particular order:

1. It violates the FSF's "Free Software Definition". Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program for any purpose. They explain this as:

    The freedom to run the program means the freedom
    for any kind of person or organization to use it
    on any kind of computer system, for any kind of
    overall job and purpose, without being required to
    communicate about it with the developer or any
    other specific entity. In this freedom, it is
    the user's purpose that matters, not the
    developer's purpose; you as a user are free
    to run the program for your purposes, and if
    you distribute it to someone else, she is then
    free to run it for her purposes, but you are
    not entitled to impose your purposes on her.
If I, as a user, wish to run an AGPL program as a daemon on my system to generate forms that get presented to customers and that processes the input the customers type into the forms, I'm the user. AGPL requires that I communicate about the program with the customers. This violates Freedom 0.

2. It seems at odds with #10 of the OSI Open Source Definition ("No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface").

3. It prohibits something that is allowed by copyright law. Pretty much every other free/open license is based on granting permission for you to do things that would not be allowed under copyright law, without requiring you to give up any of your rights allowed by copyright as the owner of a particular copy lawfully made. To put it succinctly, AGPL is a EULA.

That the FSF accepted AGPL shows a major breakdown in their idealism.

Re: Google Code Project Hosting relaxes license policy

#13

Post by ZeroGravitas »

durin42 wrote: post #11
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the bigger paradoxes of the arrival of the internet. It more or less empowered open source, and then by having the browser as a client made it possible for companies to use open source internally and to build services exposed to end users on top of that open source that will never be released as open source. The 'affero GPL' attempts to cure this: http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html (and the current versio…

I'd recommend pretty strongly against the AGPL. I know it sounds good when you want to "screw $megacorp," but it actually has all sorts of legal wrinkles in it that make ensuring compliance almost impossible in some cases. The end result is that people paranoid about getting sued about license problems will just not use your code most of the time, and that feels like damage done to the community, not help.

Sounds like something people used to say about the GPL itself before it became boringly normal for megacorps to use it.
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