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SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Posted Mar 14, 2013 8:24 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
Parent article: SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

It's funny that all these discussions are ignoring the position of software developer's (web developers here) even if they are supposedly do all that for their sake.

Microsoft may preach that GPL is scary, viral and awful as long as it wants but the fact remains: compliance is not a problem for Joe Average Developer. Either s/he uses binary offered by someone else (and then 3c of GPLv2 or 6d of GPLv3 is easy to satisfy) or it's program in a source form (and then 3a of GPLv2 or 6d of GPLv3 is more-or-less automatically satisfied). Most "normal" programs don't encourage you to change the source, extensions are done via some form of plugins.

But AGPL is a problem for Jor Average Web-Developer. Most server-side frameworks basically encourage changes and it's easy to embed many-many things in them which you don't want to give to just anyone (think LWN: how that "source code release" process is going?). This means that AGPL is quickly becoming boogeymen. Compare number of GPL projects and number of AGPL project. Then compare amount of article-described "up-selling" abuse. People learn to avoid AGPL (and often GPL since it looks similar).

The fact that existing web software quickly becomes quite a mess after deployment (because there are local modifications you can not easily upgrade to latest-and-greatest version and because it's not upgraded it contains plethora of well-known security holes) is bad for other reason but till this mess will not be fixed AGPL can not change the situation.

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SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Posted Mar 14, 2013 11:13 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link]

Honestly this just sounds like FUD after thinking about it a minute.

Your overall argument seems to be that AGPL makes it harder to develop proprietary code for web developers, and that is obviously a problem! You seem completely oblivious that from the perspective of software freedom, the problem is almost exactly the opposite.

Also, plugins are in many/most cases under the terms of the GPL if the underlying program is GPL.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins

SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Posted Mar 14, 2013 12:34 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (guest, #60784) [Link]

My (admittedly quite literalist) reading of section 13 of the AGPL leads me to the belief that modifying an AGPL'd web server precludes allowing direct download of non-textual data via external links; any request for such data without a local referrer header would have to interpose some kind of annoying advertising page:

if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.

(I'm assuming "downloading a binary file via a manually clicked deep link from outside" is interaction. I am, of course, not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.)

SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Posted Mar 17, 2013 10:59 UTC (Sun) by filipjoelsson (guest, #2622) [Link]

So, i'm a Drupal developer working for a small newspaper publisher. I have coded a custom theme and a custom subscription module, as well as a module containing asorted hacks (changing the weight of specific article sections under certain conditions, adding publishing date and section title between the boldfaced preface and the text body, really layout stuff - but better done in a module). None of these is general enough to be usefull to others (except possibly as example code, but IMHO it's a bit too involved for that too).

I'm pretty confident that there is not opening for an SQL injection there, but the stuff is not general enough to be usefull to others. What's the point for me to share it? I file bug reports and patches to Drupal and the modules I use - but wouldn't AGPL include my local theming work?

I don't think this is FUD. Forcing web devs to distribute local modifications looks like busy work to me. Of course I'd be better off with general solutions - but my employer can't afford the investment. I am pretty confident my story is a common one.

IMHO a lot of the webb stuff, including CMS, are comparable to layout programs. But noone is yelling that Scribus should add a source code link to every produced print, right?

SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Posted Mar 14, 2013 13:04 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]

> The fact that existing web software quickly becomes quite a mess after deployment (because there are local modifications you can not easily upgrade to latest-and-greatest version and because it's not upgraded it contains plethora of well-known security holes) is bad for other reason but till this mess will not be fixed AGPL can not change the situation.

This is an issue in the web programming world, it seems, indeed. Whether the sort of people who are so slapdash are the sort of people who would respect free software licenses is an interesting question. Frankly the loss of code modifications by people who are too incompetent to separate their code from the framework and configuration they use is probably not such a big deal ;)

SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Posted Mar 14, 2013 20:30 UTC (Thu) by Max.Hyre (guest, #1054) [Link]

[A]ll these discussions are ignoring the position of software developer's (web developers here) even if they are supposedly do all that for their sake.

Be careful in your characterizations. `Open source' is for the developers; `Free Software' is for the users. I'm sure it's the latter that Mr. Kuhn is addressing.

I don't really believe in the user/developer divide.

Posted Mar 15, 2013 3:38 UTC (Fri) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link]

I basically believe every user is a potential developer, and that every developer is a user of some other software that they never bother to read the source to. I don't really believe in the user/developer divide is nor should be as wide as we tend to believe it is.

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