Re: Proposal: "AGPLv3 or later" license to protect the project software

[MJ Ray]

Davi Leal <address@hidden> wrote:
> MJ Ray wrote: [...]
> > ambiguous, many free software developers (+me) don't consider it a
> > free software licence.  Please don't use it yet.
>
> Even Debian's ftpmasters are accepting AGPL material into main [1], that is 
> say, as Free Software in the Debian sense.
>   [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/11/msg00061.html

And here's the serious bug about that AGPL material getting into main:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=506042

The debian project is not infallible.  Even PINE was in main once.

> We seems to disagree at this point.  Sincerely, IMHO, for this kind of 
> project, (a free software webapp), there is not better license to protect 
> _users_ freedom than the AGPLv3.

It depends which users - AGPLv3 penalises app-hosting users to benefit
non-hosting users.

> It is known the GPLv3 applied to webapps can be exploded by Application 
> Service Providers (ASP); without giving back to the community and locking to 
> its users.

It is known that the same can happen in some ways with AGPLv3.  Evil
people will always do bad stuff.  Generally, it is wrong to punish
friendly people to defend against evil people.

(I wonder if one's opinion of AGPLv3 correlates with one's opinion
about the war on terrorism.  While I was growing up, my nearest city
centre was firebombed - you deal with the incident and carry on
regardless.  Compromise if we can, if there's any reasoning behind the
attach, but I believe we must not surrender our ways because of it.)

> That has already happened:  The software which runs Savannah [2] started from 
> the need to escape from the locking process applied to software which 
> SourceForge was running on [3]. Such software was licensed under "GPLv2 or 
> later".  Do you remember it?

Yes and I worked on an alternative (coopX) for a while but the FSF
promoted Savannah instead, which doesn't solve any of the SourceForge
bugs which allowed lock-in.  Until we have hosting services which
reflect modern distributed version control systems, another
SourceForge is possible.  I'm doing a bit of work around DOAP, but
it's unfunded and therefore slow going.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237