Re: AGPL and Debian
I'll only comment on point 1, the use fee, because I think others have
answered the other questions and found solutions for the problem.
Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> wrote:
> We do not think that this is a severe enough problem to restrict the
> freeness of a work licensed using the AGPL.
> - Offering a publically accessible network service already comes with a
> cost that might be hard to calculate. Think about DDOS attacks for
> example.
Thinking about DDOS attacks, we can try to filter out the requests
that we believe to be abusive. Do ftpmasters consider that debian
users are allowed to filter out requests for the Corresponding Source
that we believe to be abusive?
> - For practical matters the distribution costs via the internet are
> close to zero for free software. While bandwidth does cost money, and
> having a (say) 20MB app downloaded a million times would create a
> large cost, the license text reads "from a network server at no
> charge". This means it is not required to be your own server, so you
> can use any of the free services, like Alioth, Savannah, SourceForge,
> Launchpad or Google Code. While those are only there for Free
> Software - that is the case for AGPL applications.
As an aside, last I checked, Savannah does not allow free software
documention under GPL, while SourceForge and LaunchPad are non-free
and hard to control, and Google Code has age restrictions and other
problems, but there are more hosting services not mentioned above, so
the general point still stands.
> Considering those points, the requirement to make the source available
> does not seem to be one which restricts the usage of the software in any
> way related to us and the DFSG.
The concern here is that the application has to refuse to serve users
if it can't verify that the source code hosting service is capable of
serving. A few licensors have happily stated that hosting on one and
linking to it is sufficient, but I'm not sure if that's generally
accepted, or whether the auto-kill-switch is necessary. Do you
believe it's generally accepted that uploading+linking to a public
service is fine, or is it not related to the DFSG if the software is
required to take itself offline if (for example) Alioth is down, or is
there some other reason this is irrelevant?
[...loose end...]
> Why might it forbid the private usage of software? Section 13 only
> requires to offer the source to the users of your service. As such you
> only need to give it to the limited user set your private usage has.
I think the argument was that if your web application just serves a
"permission denied" page, are they a user? But, that is probably
dealt with along similar lines to this:-
> Also, we tend to agree with the FSFs opinion that a client does not need
> to provide you access to the source of the servers it interacts with, see
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3ServerAsUser
Hope you don't mind clarifying how you think public hosting services
should be used to avoid the AGPLv3 use fee.
Thanks,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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