Re: Final text of AGPL v3
On Tuesday 20 November 2007 10:50:32 am John Halton wrote:
> On 20/11/2007, Sean Kellogg <skellogg@gmail.com> wrote:
> > As a
> > user of a website running the stack I'm really interacting with
> > two things... the browser which presents all this pretty buttons
> > and links... and the apache server by means of HTTP requests.
> > It's the server which then goes and talks to the PHP/Perl/Python
> > code to generate a bunch of HTML and is then sent back to the
> > user via HTTP.
>
> All this serves me right for wading into technical details... ;-)
Hey... you're a lawyer running debian, I can hardly complain!
> I agree with what you say, and this seems consistent with the FSF
> guidance (where the priority is on "receiving and making requests",
> see
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3Interactin
>gRemotely). So the apache server *would* be software capable of
> supporting interaction over a network.
>
> > Ultimately I am still left without a meaningful definition of
> > interaction.
>
> I agree that it would be helpful to have further guidance from the
> FSF. It appears though that the key elements are (i) accepting user
> requests and sending them over a network, and (ii) this being in
> some way inherent to the application's intended functionality (i.e.
> it "supports" such interaction in an active, intentional sense,
> rather than such interaction merely being technically possible).
Now, the application's "intended" functionality is an interesting
concept. I wonder whose intentions matter here? If the author
intends it have such interaction and provides source, and modifier
downloads the source and turns it into something that doesn't
interact, does that change anything? And, if a third party gets
modifier's source by whatever means and changes it yet more and adds
back network interactivity, now whose intentions matter? Perhaps we
should ask the application what it itends... you never know these
days, I'm sure some applications are smart enough to have an opinion.
Oy... this doesn't seem like it's going anywhere good. They should
have just written a license that says "you must give back your
changes, even if you don't distribute" and just called it good...
because that's going to be the net effect of this license in any
context that people consider using it. These extra legal contortions
are just an attempt to mask a non-free clause as, well, free.
-Sean
--
Sean Kellogg
e: skellogg@gmail.com
w: http://blog.probonogeek.org/
So, let go
...Jump in
...Oh well, what you waiting for?
...it's all right
...'Cause there's beauty in the breakdown
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