Re: Proposal: "AGPLv3 or later" -- libre and distributed services

[Davi Leal]

MJ Ray wrote:
> > > ambiguous, many free software developers (+me) don't consider it a
> > > free software licence.  Please don't use it yet.

Why do you not consider it a free software license?


> > 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.

You are right, the Debian project is not infallible.


> > 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.

Define users.

I mean by user who access the webapp and interact with it.

People who install the webapp to offer a service, etc. are not users in that 
sense but service providers.


Anyway, the AGPLv3 do not penalizes app-hosting because the source code 
tar-ball can be served since libre sites as Savannah.


> > 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.

IMHO the AGPLv3 is a needed tool to try to avoid evil people doing bad things: 
locking the webapp source code, keeping it secret, ...

IMHO the AGPLv3 does not punish friendly people. People just have to learn how 
it use it rightly;  If your problem is because you do not want to load your 
web server with the tar-ball download, then you can just move such tar-ball 
to Savannah or any other libre service.

> (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.)

Talking about the GNU Herds project, we can keep serving the source tar-ball 
at [1], because serving it as we do is not a problem for the GNU Herds 
project.

That is to say, using the AGPLv3 is not a problem for the GNU Herds project. 
IMHO, we produce software for the GNU Herds project.


[1] http://gnuherds.org/gnuherds-online.tar.gz


> > 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.

Well, at least Savannah is administrated with software freedom in mind.

> Until we have hosting services which reflect modern distributed
> version control systems, another SourceForge is possible. 

Adding distributed feature to GNU Herds would be a good think IMHO. The task 
was already added some time ago:

  [task]: Herds -- federated sites
          http://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?7819

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnuherds-app-dev/2008-03/msg00006.html


However, IMHO, it would be good some of such federated sites use the AGPLv3, 
to try to avoid fork-and-locking of the source code which runs the 
federation.

IMHO, AGPLv3 is needed because they are webapps, else we could use the GPLv3 
instead.