Re: Ghostscript licensing changed to AGPL
In article <nfdvY-6FE-7@gated-at.bofh.it>,
Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> wrote:
>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.
Although the intent of AGPLv3 may be for web apps, the actual wording used
is "interacting with it remotely through a computer network".
So, when someone is running xdvi through a thin client, and xdvi calls gs
as a subprocess, then they are interacting with gs through a computer network
and AGPL (section 13, specifically) applies.
>> > * 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.
See my paragraph above.
Also, please note that texlive is a compilation of many parts from
many different sources, and they use different licenses. In particular,
xdvi uses a license based on the X Consortium license.
--Paul Vojta, vojta@math.berkeley.edu
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