Re: Is AGPLv3 DFSG-free?
* Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org> [080907 19:57]:
> Hmmm, let???s see: If some company takes a hypothetical AGPL-licensed
> variant of OpenOffice, improves it heavily and incompatibly, and it
> becomes the new de-facto standard for office document exchange ??? but
> they don???t distribute it, but put it on terminal servers, maybe with
> expensive access ...
>
> ... then, in the spirit of Free Software, I'll be thankful that due to
> the AGPL I, as a user, can get the source from it.
It might be good to have the source then, but the way to get it would definitly
not be in the spirit of Free software.
This is not the first example of something intended good[1] went in the
wrong direction. Take for example the povray license, it is in non-free
and rightly so. It does all kind of ugly things (which are too numerous
to enumerate), but everything under the rationale to prevent that people
are tricked to not know that they can get the source and that it is a "free"
project[2].
And I think if we go through the archives we will find a large number of
other examples that tried to protect user's freedom but take away too
much for it. We did reject to give them our "dfsg-free" tag in the past,
and I see no reason to label non-free things free in the future.
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
[1] There is a German proverb "Das Gegenteil von gut ist gut gemeint",
which translates roughly to
"the opposite of doing good is done with good intentions".
[2] And now that free software is very widespread and such fears are
clearly unfounded, its too late to change the license, even if
all people active now could agree...
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