On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 16:21 +0000, Lee Braiden wrote: > On Wednesday 18 January 2006 08:55, Simon Waters wrote: > > The Affero GPL is the appropriate licence if you wish to prevent code > > being hoarded by ASPs, my reading is this won't change. Or did I miss > > something? > > What you may be "missing" is that, if I remember correctly, around when the > Affero license was launched, there was a lot of talk of it just being a > stop-gap license, until GPLv3 was done. I was really hoping to see something > along those lines, for one.
Well, there is something there - you can, as an option, require an Affero-style quine function to be permanently available (a quine is a program which outputs its own source code). I think the idea is still that the Affero be retired. So, GPLv3 can be made to act like Affero if that is what you want, and the draft remains as-is. I have doubts about this clause, though. I think it works extremely well for web applications written in interpreted languages; I don't think it affects the freeness of a program in that regard. In other circumstances, I think it works less well. Also, it doesn't really address situations where the program is not interpreted, or the interface is projected in some other way - a good example would be running an application via an NX server. The basic "problem" is still the same - user gets access to the application, but not the source - but the solution given begins to falter (it becomes progressively more difficult to make the quine-like function available and useful as the app gets more complex). I wonder if the GPLv3 over-generalises the clause. Maybe it should be 'If the application presents an HTML interface via a webserver, and that interface has a quine function, you may not remove it'. I think both the other situations, and the problems that people have raised with this clause, are all basically non-interesting corner cases which do little to increase freedom. I also think this aspect of the draft will be the most controversial, and would have lit fires were it not for the fact that it's optional. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
