Re: Should the ASP loophole be fixed? (Re: The Affero license)
David Turner <novalis@novalis.org> writes:
> 1. Licenses are Free Software licenses iff
> a. They infringe no fundamental rights
> b. They have no excessively onerous terms
"Fundamental rights" is your term, not mine.
This also omits the crucial ordering that I mentioned. The point of
(b) is that a non-onerous infringement is not a problem. The only
infrigements on freedom that matter are those which are a genuine
burden. It is in that context (only) that (b) applies.
> 2. Fundamental rights include the right to deny to users of the
> software, access to source code for the software.
No, this misstates my position. If a user is also a possessor of the
software, then indeed, it is not a fundamental right to deny them the
source. Rather, I agree with the GPL that they should have the
source.
> 4. Fundamental rights include the right to deny to *non-users* of the
> software, access to the source code for the software
No, this misstates my position. Possessors of the software, whether
users or not, should have access to the source code.
> 5. No visitor to a web page is in any sense a user of the software which
> generates and serves that web page. So, the AGPL is non-free.
I am happy to grant that a visitor to a web page is a "user", if you
will also grant that I am a user of the software that my university
uses to track my academic record.
> 6. Even if these fundamental rights didn't include (2), the AGPL's
> (2)(d) is an excessively onerous term.
Excessive onerousness doesn't matter for things which aren't
limitations on freedom. For example, being obliged to provide source
under the terms of the GPL might well be onerous to some people, but
since it isn't a real limitation on freedom, I don't care.
Thomas
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