[Koha] Proposal To Switch Koha's License to GPLv3 and AGPLv3 or AGPLv3

[Chris Cormack]

On 11 May 2010 13:09,  <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> On Tue, 11 May 2010, Chris Cormack wrote:
>
>> It's interesting who comes out of the woodwork when licensing comes
>> up, it seems people have strong opinions on it, even people only
>> tangentially related to the project.
>> I think you are missing a lot of context to this discussion, it has
>> come up quite a few times in the past, and the fact is the growing
>> trend worldwide of Software as a Service, and the ghettoisation of
>> code and users that can result from that is what is behind (at least
>> for myself) this discussion.
>> I think that users should have the right to have the source code of
>> the software they are using, and I believe that this freedom is one of
>> the 4 freedoms the GPL was designed to protect.
>> I think that these freedoms outweigh some nebulous security concern,
>> and that the important thing is that users are protected from lockin.
>> If you have a better way to achieve this than APGL3, or GPLv3 + an
>> additional clause, I'm all ears.
>
> You are right that I have not seen the prior discussions (I've only been
> subscribed to the list for a month or two). You are also right that I am not
> (yet) involved with this project (not even as a user yet, I haven't had the
> time yet to test and figure out how to enter my several thousand books). If
> you feel that this means that my opinions are irrelavent, please let me know
> and I will unsubscribe and search for another tool to consider using
> instead.
>
> A little background on me since I am not an active community member yet. My
> full time job is in security as a major financial services company. I have
> been using Linux as my desktop full time for over 12 years at work (longer
> at home) and while I don't contribute much code to the projects that I use,
> I do use a lot of opensource projects and do a fair amount of testing, bug
> reporting, and (after becoming familiar with the project) support for other
> users on the mailing lists.
>
>
> As for your concerns. Yes, if you believe that SaaS is a major problem, then
> AGPL is the license that you need (and no, GPLv3 is not good enough to
> prevent the problem you are describing). However your post at the start of
> this thread did not make it clear that this is what you were pushing for.
>
> I don't happen to believe that this is a major problem, and definantly not a
> problem large enough to be worth the drawbacks involved with moving to a
> lesser used license like the AGPL.
>
> Even though the GPLv3 allows code to be converted to AGPL, that doesn't mean
> that doing so won't annoy people who don't want to use the AGPL that you
> take code from (for examples of a similar problem, look at the outrage from
> people who release code under BSD licenses against project that are GPL and
> incorporate their code) , and you may not be able to submit any fixes that
> you have back upstream to them. If you maintain a dual GPLv3 and AGPL
> license, then you don't achieve your goal, anyone wanting to do things that
> you don't want them to do will just use the GPLv3 license.
>
> I believe that if the open project moves rapidly enough in developing it's
> version, anyone who tries to maintain a fork is going to fall behind and
> find that they are better off using the community version than their own
> fork. In a good community with many different companies involved (which I
> understand Koha is), the combined resources of the rest of the community
> will outstrip the resources of any one company that tries to maintain a
> fork. You will occasionally have a company that misbehaves, or at least
> skirts the line, but I don't think adding restrictions to the license will
> really help much in this area.
>
> Unless a company is going to go only the SaaS route, they will be giving
> their code to their clients, and any one of those clients can redistribute
> the code. So the probability of the source being locked up out of sight is
> relativly low.
>
> But as the android problem with the linux kernel is showing, even if the
> code is available it doesn't nessasarily do the main project much good if
> the company working on the fork isn't interested in getting their changes
> merged back upstream. Perl is especially good for a company who chooses to
> make life hard for outsiders wanting to merge the changes back as there are
> so many different ways to do things and to obuscate what is happening. It
> doesn't even take malice on the part of the company, just hiring developers
> who use coding styles and perl features significantly different from the
> community will make merging things back hard enough that they become almost
> the same as writing the features from scratch.
>
> So I don't believe that AGPL is really going to be effective at solving the
> problem that you are anticipating, and I do see drawbacks in using it as
> your license.
>
Objection heard.

Lets hear from some others now.

Chris