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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Berkeley DB relicensed to AGPLv3 (Paul Walker)
2. Re: Berkeley DB relicensed to AGPLv3 (Karl Oman)
3. Re: Berkeley DB relicensed to AGPLv3 (Miles Fidelman)
4. Re: Berkeley DB relicensed to AGPLv3 (Russ Allbery)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 13:04:59 +0100
From: Paul Walker <[email protected]>
To: Russ Allbery <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Berkeley DB relicensed to AGPLv3
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
On 3 Jul 2013, at 19:06, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
> True, but it's not clear that actually satisfies the requirement. The
> license says that the source must be offered to all users who interact
> with the program. The banner would clearly qualify, since it's always
I'd say it's not clear this actually applies to INN at all anyway, really.
Users don't (usually!) interact with INN directly - they use other software,
slrn, other news transit stuff (suck), etc. Even if you put a message in the
MOTD/help status, unless slrn or similar displays it the end-user still won't
see it.
My guess is it's more designed for interactive programs running on the desktop,
not for daemons.
Paul
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 16:53:50 +0200
From: Karl Oman <[email protected]>
To: Paul Walker <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Berkeley DB relicensed to AGPLv3
Message-ID:
<caaxknohk8kadhbtvz86_ps9qcgue8kwfwvck7dlkq0dwggt...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
good :
My guess is it's more designed for interactive programs running on the
desktop, not for daemons.
2013/7/4 Paul Walker <[email protected]>
> On 3 Jul 2013, at 19:06, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > True, but it's not clear that actually satisfies the requirement. The
> > license says that the source must be offered to all users who interact
> > with the program. The banner would clearly qualify, since it's always
>
> I'd say it's not clear this actually applies to INN at all anyway, really.
> Users don't (usually!) interact with INN directly - they use other
> software, slrn, other news transit stuff (suck), etc. Even if you put a
> message in the MOTD/help status, unless slrn or similar displays it the
> end-user still won't see it.
>
> My guess is it's more designed for interactive programs running on the
> desktop, not for daemons.
>
> Paul
>
> _______________________________________________
> inn-workers mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/inn-workers
>
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Message: 3
Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 11:32:54 -0400
From: Miles Fidelman <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Berkeley DB relicensed to AGPLv3
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
actually, just the opposite:
From http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html
"The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the
ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run the
program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your
server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to
the program that it's running. If what's running there is your modified
version of the program, the server's users must get the source code as
you modified it."
Also, seems to be compatible with the ISC license that INN is released
under:
from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
This license is sometimes also known as the OpenBSD License. It is a
lax, permissive free software license, and compatible with the GNU GPL.
This license does have an unfortunate wording choice: it provides
recipients with "Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute
this software?" This is roughly the same language from the license
of Pine that the University of Washington later claimed prohibited
people from distributing modified versions of the software.
ISC has told us they do not share the University of Washington's
interpretation, and we have every reason to believe them. Thus,
there's no reason to avoid software released under this license.
However, to help make sure this language cannot cause any trouble in
the future, we encourage developers to choose a different license
for their own works. The Expat License
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat> and FreeBSD
License <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD> are
similarly permissive and brief.
Karl Oman wrote:
> good :
> My guess is it's more designed for interactive programs running on the
> desktop, not for daemons.
>
>
> 2013/7/4 Paul Walker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>
> On 3 Jul 2013, at 19:06, Russ Allbery <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> > True, but it's not clear that actually satisfies the
> requirement. ? The
> > license says that the source must be offered to all users who
> interact
> > with the program. ? The banner would clearly qualify, since it's
> always
>
> I'd say it's not clear this actually applies to INN at all anyway,
> really. Users don't (usually!) interact with INN directly - they
> use other software, ? slrn, other news transit stuff (suck), etc.
> Even if you put a message in the MOTD/help status, unless slrn or
> similar displays it the end-user still won't see it.
>
> My guess is it's more designed for interactive programs running on
> the desktop, not for daemons.
>
> Paul
>
> _______________________________________________
> inn-workers mailing list
> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/inn-workers
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> inn-workers mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/inn-workers
--
Miles Fidelman, Principal
Protocol Technologies Group, LLC
617-538-9249 - [email protected]
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 11:14:52 -0700
From: Russ Allbery <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Berkeley DB relicensed to AGPLv3
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Miles Fidelman <[email protected]> writes:
> Also, seems to be compatible with the ISC license that INN is released
> under:
> from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
Note that what the FSF means by "compatible" is that you can take
ISC-liensed code and incorporate it into an AGPLv3-licensed work. The
resulting work as a whole is then covered by the AGPLv3.
So, the way this works (at least if one uses the interpretation that a
binary linked with shared libraries is a derivative work of those shared
libraries, which is the legally conservative approach but is somewhat
controversial) is that INN as distributed by ISC remains under the same
license. As does any build of INN that doesn't use Berkeley DB. But a
build of INN linked with Berkeley DB is now an AGPLv3-licensed work (since
otherwise it's illegal to use Berkeley DB in it). Anyone running that
version of INN then has to comply with the AGPLv3, which includes the
notice requirement for source code and also includes making source code
available.
So, for instance, if you have a version of INN linked with the
AGPLv3-covered Berkeley DB and you apply some random patch, maybe from the
next version of INN, to fix some problem you're having, a conservative
reading of the license says that you now have to make available the
modified source code of INN to any client that connects to the server and
put an advertisement for how to obtain that source somewhere that clients
see. It's not clear to me whether that can be in HELP or LIST MOTD or
whether it would need to be in the banner.
I think this is unreasonably onerous.
The AGPLv3 is trying to solve a real problem, and I have some appreciation
for the goal. The problem it was trying to solve is that, increasingly,
computing consists of some sort of very lightweight UI shim that's
downloaded to the client (often now written in Javascript) and a server
architecture that runs as a service. Think Amazon Web Services,
Salesforce, etc. This is a great way of dodging out of GPL requirements,
since Amazon (for example) can use GPL software all they want internally
to construct those applications without having to provide source code to
anyone since they never actually distribute the software, just run it on a
server. If one is concerned with keeping people from using GPL-covered
software to create proprietary software that users don't get the source
code to, that's a fairly huge hole.
INN at least superficially could fall into the same category of software,
since it's a client-server model. However:
1. No one is commercially abusing INN in this way that I'm aware of, so
it's irrelevant for INN even if you think this is a bad thing.
2. INN was put under a permissive license that allows commercial and
closed-source derived works for a reason. There's an ongoing
philosophical difference in the community about whether copyleft is a
good idea or not, and strong arguments to be made for either side, but
most existing software bases have picked one approach or another and
it's considered quite bad form to change later on (not to mention often
legally impossible to do). For better or for ill, INN is in the
"closed-source derived works are fine" camp (with the exception of a
few supporting programs).
I personally therefore find it quite annoying that a license change in a
supporting library could be used to force people to treat INN as if it
were a AGPLv3-covered work. And I also don't believe that Berkeley DB is
anything so special and important that it should warrant this level of
protection for its open source nature when used as part of the backend of
unrelated software. I could sort of see this if the license change only
applied to some completely novel and ground-breaking database backend, but
to take basically the same software that's existed for years and years and
make the license suddenly drastically more restrictive in a way that
affects everything that's built with it strikes me as rather obnoxious.
--
Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.
------------------------------
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