[Koha] Liblime, Koha, BibLibre and FLOSS

[MJ Ray]

Colin Campbell wrote:
> On 10/22/2009 08:53 PM, Kyle Hall 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 
> 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