Colin Campbell wrote:
On 10/23/2009 11:00 AM, MJ Ray wrote:
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
I've read them first time and thought your view of the license a caricature. The license does not mention co-operation [...]
Erm, yes it does. The first body paragraph of http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html says: "The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works, specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community in the case of network server software." Note "ensure cooperation" there on line three. As one can see, the AGPL is "specifically designed" around that absurd idea, which should worry everyone. Please read and analyse the licence before accusing others of making caricatures of it. There are *big* tricky unanswered questions in it, not just about whether it makes hosted applications actually open or just means they get locked in a different way, but also about whether users have to bear significant costs and risks in using AGPL'd code. Some of these result from the basic absurdity, some do not. Regards, -- 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