Re: Do Debian's users care about the AGPL?
> I care. The AGPL is dangerous to Opensource. It is too aggressive and
> too restrictive. As Opensource becomes more dominant,
> software-as-a-service (SAAS) will become the primary way for people to
> make money through software. The AGPL threatens to cut off Opensource
> from its primary means of acquiring income and maintaining relevance.
How does requiring source code be available do anything to hurt the open source
movement? I'm pretty sure software-as-a-service doesn't mean "proprietary
enhancements to open source software that we don't want to contribute back to
the community for competitive/business reasons".
> I am in favor of Opensource because it allows me to be free and to make
> money, but if Opensource prohibited me from making money, I'd be against
> it.
If you can only make money when you aren't required to make any changes to the
source available, how can you claim to be participating in Opensource?
The whole goal of the GPL was to prevent companies from taking other people's
code, enhancing it, then profiting without sharing those enhancements. The loop
hole in that are things like web services where the binary isn't actually
distributed. The AGPL closes that loop hole by requiring that source code
changes be made available to users of such services.
- Chris
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