[Koha] Liblime, Koha, BibLibre and FLOSS

[MJ Ray]

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