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Posted Sep 24, 2005 17:36 UTC (Sat) by job (subscriber, #670)
Parent article: RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet)
I sincerely hope that the FSF takes a very cautious approach to the "ASP loophole". While I do agree with the above assertment that VNC-style remote GUI of an application is an effective way around the redistribution rights of the GPL, I do also realise that Google can't be expected to release the source of their software just because they run it on Linux.
I also don't think the problem of web apps is as big as the problem of locking in the users data in the web apps colocation centres. What good is it to have access to all these free software to manipulate your data when you don't have your own data in the first place? This is however far beyond the scope of the GNU project and can most probably not be addressed by licensing.
More pressing are the patent clauses that are starting to appear in other licenses such as Apache's. They may be a good idea, I am not really qualified to say, but that is creates an incompatibility with the GPL is somewhat unnecessary and should be fixed.
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Posted Sep 24, 2005 20:20 UTC (Sat) by peschmae (guest, #32292) [Link] I don't think the idea *ever* came up to force people to publish their software under the GPL only because they are running on Linux (or another GPLed system).
What they are talking about is a web service being based on a GPL 3.0ed web service and that this modified code (based on GPL 3.0 code) should be available under the terms of GPL 3.0 to users of this web service as well.
Posted Sep 25, 2005 13:00 UTC (Sun) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link] You fail to see the problem. Google is a big application and parts of it, such as the GoogleFS which was published in an article, probably runs in the kernel. That makes it a "derived work". (Most probably. Exactly what constitutes a derived work will be the point of many flame wars.) This currently doesn't matter because they are clearly not distributing anything. Closing the ASP loophole may have lots of unforeseen consequences such as this one.
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