I have some questions about the implications of the GPLv3 for programs that are operated remotely from a web interface. I hope to receive some comments from you before we consider seeking legal advice.
We run a small company which has developed a number of multimedia related software tools, most of which we distribute under the GPL. Our revenue comes from support services, explaining why we encourage our customers to share the tools with others, and we also received valuable bugfixes and new features in return, much in agreement with the open source 'philosophy'. With the hype about web applications we saw the possibility that somebody took our source code, modified it for their purposes and made it accessible from the internet, thus circumventing the GPL requirement that they publish the changed sources together with 'distributing' the code. During the discussion of the GPLv3 draft it became clear that this loophole was one of the points that should be fixed with the new GPL version. So we changed the licenses of all our recent developments to GPLv3 as soon as it was finalized. Unfortunately our pessimistic anticipations became truth. A company larger than ours seems to be operating our tools with a javascript interface on their website without mentioning the origin, supplying the source code of our original software or of their changes. We are reluctant to accept that they profit from our work in a way that is possibly violating the license agreement without returning something to the open source community. Although we considered this to be an obvious violation of the GPLv3 at the moment when we decided to migrate to that license version, we are not sure any more. When returning to the finalized GPLv3 wording we found the sentence `To "convey" a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.' Does this imply that the other company is still using our work in agreement with the GPLv3? Further investigations on this question revealed that we had probably better chosen the Affero AGPLv3 license (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/ licenses/agpl-3.0.html) which explains one of the differences to the GPLv3 with: 'The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.' Can somebody please confirm that we are on the safe side, if we now change to the AGPLv3 in order to enforce our intentions as described above? I am looking forward to a general affirmation that what I wrote doesn't reveal apparent misunderstandings. Later I'd like to become more specific, because the mentioned website also displays documentation, icons and images that are included in our software as well as media processing scripts that are generated by our software. Cheers, Joe _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
