Re: The Affero license
On Fri, 2003-03-07 at 16:17, Brian T. Sniffen wrote:
> tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:
>
> > Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:
> >
> >> Forced publication of in-house development considerably increases the
> >> cost of running software.
> >
> > This is only true when you adopt a "high falutin" concept of
> > "publication".
> >
> > Make a tar file, put it on a web site, a five minute job. Advertise a
> > bug-reporting and comments mailing address, and then a reflector on
> > that list which says "sorry, but we don't have the time or resources
> > to answer your email or even read it." Another five minutes.
>
> That's not sufficient for a modern corporation: you have a duty to the
> shareholders to carefully examine all the code before publishing it,
> to ensure that no competitive advantage is lost or corporate resource
> squandered. You might have proprietary information embedded in the
> code (database passwords in your PHP-Nuke modifications, for example)
> or sensitive information in comments.
>
> It takes at least a couple of developers to read the entire source
> you're about to publish, together with an IP lawyer and somone versed
> in the operations of the company available to answer their questions.
This is true any time you publish source code. Will you suggest that
section 3 (requiring the publishing of source code when binaries are
distributed) be stricken for this reason too?
> When you set up the mailing address, you're advertising it as a way to
> contact your company about these issues; I'm not a lawyer, but don't
> you have a responsibility to live up to that obligation?
No.
> Not to
> mention the public relations hit from just spewing your code out
> there: this community is fickle, and a poorly done release is a great
> way to annoy it.
None of this mailing list stuff has anything to do with the actual AGPL.
--
-Dave Turner Stalk Me: 617 441 0668
"On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters
of principle, stand like a rock." -Thomas Jefferson
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