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GR proposal: the AGPL does not meet the DFSG



Dear developers,

I respectfully submit this general resolution proposal to your consideration.

Asking for seconds.

- - - - - - -
General Resolution made in accordance with Debian Constitution 4.1.5:

The Debian project resolves that softwares licensed under the GNU Affero
Public License are not free according to the Debian Free Software Guideline.
- - - - - - -

RATIONALE (to be amended if necessary):

1. The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is essentially the GNU General
Public License with the following additional clause reproduced below.
See http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl.html for the full text
of the license.
""
  13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.
  
  Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the
  Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting
  with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such
  interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your
  version
  by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no
  charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of
  software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for
  any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is
  incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
    
    Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to
  link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the
  GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the
  resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part
  which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain
  governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
""

2. This clause is incompatible with section 3. of the Debian Free Software
Guideline:

2.1 This clause restricts how you can modify the software.  
    Doing a simple modification to a AGPL-covered software can require you to
    write a substantial amount of extra code to comply with this clause.

2.2 This clause forces the developer modifying the software to incur the cost
    of providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server
    as long as at least one person is using the software and this for
    all published modifications, even long after the developer stopped using
    the software.

3. This clause is incompatible with section 6. of the Debian Free Software
   Guideline.

3.1 This clause does not allow you to modify the software to perform tasks
    where complying with it is not technically feasible. 

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here. 

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