Colin Campbell wrote:
Maybe access to the source of in-house modifications should be a requirement for being a listed vendor on the site? We may not be able to alter the terms of the GPL, but we can decide the terms of koha.org One thing recent events have shown is that as a community we cannot guarantee that a vendor will will act tomorrow as they act today. Or
On 10/22/2009 08:53 PM, Kyle Hall wrote: that a large vendor may not suddenly decide to bring its weight into the library market (think microsoft as a worst case, or maybe the company that does the payroll and backoffice for your institution wants to add a library package addon). As such we have to depend on the licensing terms of the software we rely on to do our work and the freedoms, rights and responsibilities that they grant us.
These are social challenges and any legal-only solution will not work well in practice. Relying only on the licensing would allow privately-owned companies that comply with the letter of the licence while not joining in the spirit of the community to exploit the community. It is essential that we bring social measures into play in a more library-involving, less legalistic way than the Koha project has for some time.
[...] We should seriously be looking at whether we should alter the licence for future contributions to Koha (and I think we may well find ourselves at the beginning of a period of major growth now). The Free Software Foundation already promote a licence that closes the Software as a Service gap, see the annoucement here:
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2007-03-29-gplv3-saas and the actual license here http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html whether this is the way to go or not the freedoms in the GPL have been a good foundation to the growth of this community. I think we need to ensure they are carried on to future users and it is a subject we need to give serious attention to
Please read the list archives. I looked at it seriously during its drafting and, personally, I feel that AGPL is a bogus licence, based on the absurd idea that one can "ensure cooperation" with contract-based compulsion when it has been well-known for over 70 years that true cooperation is voluntary. See for example http://www.ica.coop/coop/principles.html#1 There are also unanswered questions and probably other loopholes created by its current version. Anyway, see the archives. Thanks, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and LMS developer at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op