On Wednesday, July 10, 2013 01:06:47 PM Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > 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...) Sorry, I can't quite let this pass. I just went and looked at the AGPL v3 again and one implication of the license is that you can't locally fix a security issue without immediate disclosure. This doesn't fit my personal ethics at all and at least IMO makes it pretty unsuitable as a license for any network facing service. Scott K
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