On Sat, Jul 06, 2013 at 05:41:16PM +0200, Bernhard R. Link wrote: > No, there is a really important difference. With GPL you only have to be > careful when you give binaries to anyone, that you also give the source. > This is a bit of a hassle, but worst case means that you cannot help > others with the software changes you have done (bad enough but worth the > hassle to have the source) if you miss some of the sources. But if the > sources may contain any passwords or other internal data you cannot/do > not want to share, so will likely the binary so that is no difference. On this level, the analogy GPL/AGPL still seems correct to me. A software distributed under AGPL will likely come with mechanisms already in place to point to its source code --- that might not be the case today yet, due to the scarce popularity of AGPL, but that's a separate matter. That means that you can easily run unmodified version of an AGPL'd program, for any purpose, without particular restrictions. If you modify the software you might get in trouble but, according to my personal ethics, that's the trouble you should have. However, please note that as long as you run the software only for yourself, you don't have any problem. You might encounter problems only in the case you've modified the software, you want *others* to use it over the net, and you don't provide the source code that include your modifications. That shift is coherent with the shift in the most common deployment pattern for software: handing software copies in the past, using remote services over the net nowadays. (Anyway, here we're getting quite off-topic...) -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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