On Tue,02.Sep.08, 17:52:57, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote: [...] > Do Debian's users care about this sort of legal geekery or is > everything fine as long as AGPLed programs go into non-free? Freeness is not the main reason I stay with Debian, but it is important (currently I have around 20 non-free+multimedia packages installed, including nvidia driver and firmware for my wireless card). Also as an contribution to the discussion of GPL vs. AGPL, in my oppinion we have two different use cases: * classic programs - Author writes a spreadsheet program - some company customizes the program and ads support for a proprietary file format o uses it internally o sell it for revenue The GPL works fine here because whenever the company tries to generate some revenue of their changes they will have to publish the sources (making the file format non proprietary). For webapps the situation is a bit different: * webapps - Author writes a spreadsheet program - some company customizes the program and ads support for an own proprietary file format, but they will most likely: o put it up on own servers to generate revenue rather then o sell it to other service providers By using GPL in this scenario, people accessing the service will find themselves locked-in due to the proprietary file format, while with the AGPL everybody has a chance to implement support for it. Also, reading the archives of debian-legal it seems to me the biggest concern is whether the requirement of providing the source doesn't put a too high *financial* burden (ex. hosting, bandwidth, etc. costs) on providers of AGPL webapps. Regards, Andrei -- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)
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