Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
Sure, but #2 is stupid. We didn't say "must send changes back immediately." Nor would we wish any such thing; if you're in the middle of making a long series of changes we obviously want to wait until the changes are completed and have settled down. Otherwise someone could make a case that the changes should be sent back the instant they are written, one keystroke at a time, which is ludicrous.On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 12:19:47PM -0700, Howard Chu wrote:Right, I want to understand AGPL's motivations is all.I used to put similar terms on my code, back before the GPL existed. Essentially: If you modify this code, you must send your modifications back to me (the original author). The motivation is that if you fixed a bug or improved the code, you should make your improvements available to me, and I subsequently make them available to the user base at large in my next release. I don't consider this a terrible restriction - if you're using mySure, but that doesn't make it DFSG free (hint: it's likely not)[1][2] [1]: The Dissident test [2]: The Desert Island test
Send changes back in a timely manner. You obtained the software somehow; therefore at some point in time a distribution channel was available to you. The next time such channel is available, send your changes back. If you're stuck on a desert island and die before such channel reopens, no one's going to sue you.
I'd say #1 is borderline stupid. It is worded such that it only applies to hiding existence of a system from the government. Fair enough; I'm not the government. I've accepted many patches from anonymous senders for various code (see http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/ for example:
RTMP Dump v2.4 (C) 2009 Andrej Stepanchuk (C) 2009-2011 Howard Chu (C) 2010 2a665470ced7adb7156fcef47f8199a6371c117b8a79e399a2771e0b36384090 (C) 2011 33ae1ce77301f4b4494faaa5f609f3c48b9dcf82 License: GPLv2 librtmp license: LGPLv2.1 http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/ -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/