Re: Do Debian's users care about the AGPL?
On 09/03/2008 12:34 AM, Chris Burkhardt wrote:
Mumia W. wrote:
I care. The AGPL is dangerous to Opensource. It is too aggressive and
too restrictive. As Opensource becomes more dominant,
software-as-a-service (SAAS) will become the primary way for people to
make money through software. The AGPL threatens to cut off Opensource
from its primary means of acquiring income and maintaining relevance.
How does requiring source code be available do anything to hurt the open source
movement?
Companies and people that protect and promulgate OSS withdraw.
I'm pretty sure software-as-a-service doesn't mean "proprietary
enhancements to open source software that we don't want to contribute back to
the community for competitive/business reasons".
In some situations, that's exactly what it is.
I am in favor of Opensource because it allows me to be free and to make
money, but if Opensource prohibited me from making money, I'd be against
it.
If you can only make money when you aren't required to make any changes to the
source available, how can you claim to be participating in Opensource?
By itself, that isn't participating in Opensource, but companies who
have proprietary interests in OSS invariably do much more than that.
While the most profitable improvements in the software will be kept
private, the companies will provide security and many less-profitable
patches for free. They also very often provide technical support and
bandwidth.
The whole goal of the GPL was to prevent companies from taking other people's
code, enhancing it, then profiting without sharing those enhancements. The loop
hole
There is no "loophole"; it's called "vendor SaaS freedom."
in that are things like web services where the binary isn't actually
distributed. The AGPL closes that loop hole by requiring that source code
changes be made available to users of such services.
- Chris
That was not the goal of the GPL, or the FSF would have removed vendor
SaaS freedom from GPLv3.
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