I'm not sure how that's relevant but as an aside qgyh2 was a project where a large number of users used the account to post (I haven't got a source and I know it sounds myth-y but it's what I've read).
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.
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.
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".
AGPL does have some pretty deep flaws. See [0] for a description of some of the problems. I can't say I'd ever touch AGPL code with a 10 foot pole, simply because I've talked to lawyers about it and it's unbelievably messy (add to that the fact that a user of the AGPL is probably much more likely to sue you if you don't meet their expectations on the license.)
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.
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It's good to see them stepping forward to allow the use of these newer licenses on the site.
But the AGPL does make it a requirement that the user can get the source even if the system runs over a network.
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.)
The 'affero GPL' attempts to cure this:
http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html
(and the current version: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html )
But so far it has not seen widespread acceptance.
http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting/browse_th...
[0] http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=4297#c6
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:
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.