Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 19:59 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by k3ninho
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

AGPL says that you have to give people the ability to run their own version of the service you're running.

That what people say it says, but not what it says! Read the actual license text. What you say is not something a copyright license can enforce because running the software is not a reserved right of the copyright holder.

The AGPL is very vague on crucial points, in particular the meaning of 'modifying the software' and 'all users'. It it the only purportedly free software license that create liability for merely modifying the software, even if you do not run it.

13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.

"modify" is defined in the beginning as

To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a "modified version" of the earlier work or a work "based on" the earlier work.

which is still quite ambiguous.

Your best defense to the AGPL is to refuse to accept the license which is explicitly allowed, pay a third party that will never run it on a public network to do any modification to it, and then run it behind a transparent proxy that remove any offer of source from the HTML pages that are served, to cover the third party.

9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies. You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.

Trust me I am as concerned as anybody about the software as service hijack of the GPL, but the AGPL is not the solution, it just distracts us from searching for a working solution.

If you are concerned, only write GPL client-side javascript. This way anybody interacting with your code has already received a copy!

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