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Re: Ghostscript licensing changed to AGPL



On Tue, May 06, 2014 at 06:44:16PM -0700, Jose Luis Rivas wrote:
> I saw it and I fail to see what exactly they want to achieve with this
> change since AGPLv3 is for web apps.

I license almost all my work as AGPL, because I like that clause.  The idea of
the GPL is to make sure that all end users are free to do what they want, not
just the people who initially received the software.  With more and more things
turning into web applications, you need the AGPL to continue to do this.  So
even if my code is not intended for using as a web service, I want my indirect
users to have their freedoms when it is.

I didn't look into their arguments at all, but I'm guessing it's along the same
lines.

> I see you exposed your position very well but they didn't gave specifics on
> what they want to avoid with this besides "protect against commercial use of
> GPL Ghostscript" which I believe is bad enough in DFSG terms.

If they wrote "commercial" then they used the wrong term.  That should have
been "propietary".  It's the exact same protection that you expect the GPL to
give you; the only difference is that you want to protect not only end users
who receive the code, but also those who run it as a web app hosted by someone
else.

> >   * texlive-bin (texlive-binaries)
> 
> Actually with this one is worst, since the LPPL is not compatible with
> the GPL, lets not even talk about GPLv3 or AGPLv3 :-/

If it's incompatible with the GPL and the way they distributed it was
acceptable, then I can't see why anything would have changed now.

Thanks,
Bas


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