Re: Is the APSL 2.0 DFSG-compliant?

[Walter Landry <wlandry@wlandry.net>]

Ben Westover writes:

> Hello,
>
> On 8/4/22 8:30 PM, Paul Wise wrote:
>> What would have changed since the 2004 review of APSL 2.0?
>
> Here's a quote from that 2020 challenge of the APSL-1.2 being considered
> non-free in 2001:
>
>> For the APSL-1.2, it seems that the only clause that makes the
>> license non-DFSG-compliant is this one:
>>
>>> (c)  You must make Source Code of all Your Deployed Modifications
>>>      publicly available under the terms of this License, including
>>>      the license grants set forth in Section 3 below, for as long as
>>>      you Deploy the Covered Code or twelve (12) months from the date
>>>      of initial Deployment, whichever is longer. You should
>>>      preferably distribute the Source Code of Your Deployed
>>>      Modifications electronically (e.g. download from a web site);
>>
>> It was claimed in [6] that this clause makes the APSL-1.2
>> non-DFSG-compliant as it's not possible for Debian to keep every
>> single modification around for at least 12 months.
>>
>> This claim may have been valid in 2001, but I think it does not hold
>> up for 2020 since source code to packaging in Debian is usually
>> maintained in Salsa or Github and therefore keeping all modifications
>> available for 12 months and longer, plus there is Debian Snapshots [7]
>> which keeps a older versions of a package around as well - including
>> source code.
>
> Things like this make me question whether the 2004 decision to consider
> the APSL 2.0 non-DFSG-compliant is still valid in 2022. In fact, after
> reading through the thread [1] the wiki references making the APSL 2.0
> incompatible with the DFSG, I'm not so sure it does that. IANAL, but
> from what I could understand it seemed that there was a good argument
> that the alleged non-DFSG clauses actually *did* comply with the DFSG,
> and that argument wasn't fully refuted. The wiki references one other
> thread, but that thread is specifically about the APSL 1.2, which the
> APSL 2.0 fixes the issues of according to the FSF. That thread was
> finished about two years before the APSL 2.0 came into existence.

As someone who participated in that original exchange in 2004, APSL 2.0
still looks impossible to follow.  If Debian suddenly goes off-line,
Debian is not in compliance with the license.  For all of the other
licenses, offering the source at the same time is sufficient.  For APSL
2.0, Debian has to keep the source archive up for at least 12 months
since it last published a modification.

Cheers,
Walter Landry