Re: Web application licenses [was Re: Choice of venue, was: GUADEC report]

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 04:10:24PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> If you make the software or a work based on the software available for
> direct use by another party, without actually distributing the software
> to that party, you must either:
> 
> a) Distribute the complete corresponding machine-readable source code
> publically under this license, or
> b) Make the source code available to that party, under the all the same
> conditions you would need to meet in GPL section 3 if you were
> distributing a binary to that party.

Consider the general case: if my entire system was under this license,
then my small web page (serving a few small files at my 30k/sec) would
require me to put the source to Apache, glibc, openssl, and the other
dependencies (and possibly the kernel, depending where you draw the line).
If I was on a modem doing the same thing--which many people do--then even
making only the Apache source available to anyone who has access to the
page (at 5k/sec) is a huge cost.  (Each person downloading would tie up
the line for a long time.)

The costs of sending source code are generally comparable to the costs of
sending binaries; but the costs of sending source are, in many cases, orders
of magnitude greater than the costs of "making it available for use".

I seem to recall other, more specific cases showing related problems
(where the cost transmitting on some media was on the order of pennies
per sentence), but I can't recall them, or which discussion it came
up in.  Anyone remember?

-- 
Glenn Maynard