Re: Affero General Public License
* Mark Rafn:
> Is a work free if some modifications are permitted, but would make
> the resulting work non-free?
Consider a program which is licensed under the plain GPL. You
incorporate parts of OpenSSL into the program, under the standard
OpenSSL licenses. The licenses are not compatible, which means that
the resulting work is not distributable at all (but you still can run
the software for your own purposes). You could argue that this case
is different because you could reimplement the same functionality
under a compatible license, so this is slightly different. But the
example still shows that some kinds of modification can be prevented
in a DFSG-compliant manner.
I agree that it's a corner case and it's quite strange to use the AGPL
in such a manner. Maybe upstream can be convinced to use plain GPL
instead. This also avoids the problem of GPL compatibility (the AGPL
is incompatible even if the extra clause has no effect on the current
code base).
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