Re: AGPL and Debian
* Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> [081128 12:41]:
> We do not think that this is a severe enough problem to restrict the
> freeness of a work licensed using the AGPL.
> - Offering a publically accessible network service already comes with a
> cost that might be hard to calculate. Think about DDOS attacks for
> example.
So all software that does have other costs involved in its running might
just add other costly requirements?
> - For practical matters the distribution costs via the internet are
> close to zero for free software. While bandwidth does cost money, and
> having a (say) 20MB app downloaded a million times would create a
> large cost, the license text reads "from a network server at no
> charge". This means it is not required to be your own server, so you
> can use any of the free services, like Alioth, Savannah, SourceForge,
> Launchpad or Google Code. While those are only there for Free
> Software - that is the case for AGPL applications.
All of those services are usually only for code that is to be hosted for
the public. I consider the claim that there will be enough hosting
services for people needing to put their personal modifications not
suiteable for a general public consumption and not interested in any
further work to be put in that project quite short sighted and hard to
believe once there will be some more of those projects and some more
people using them.
> In conclusion we will continue to access AGPL works into main subject to
> the rest of the checks that we also normally perform.
Sadly,
Bernhard R. Link
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