Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

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Just to be clear the Affero GPL only differs in that I would have to give you source code (edit: previously typed "software") if I supply a binary for you to use over a network. My point was really just that if I have not supplied a binary to you (and hence you are not my customer), then I don't need to do anything for you. This is frequently confused by people.

They are clearly consumer rights issues, to me. Whether you think they are important consumer rights issues is quite another matter ;-). Freedom 3, IMHO is definitely more important that Freedom 2. If you've managed to fix an issue, but are prevented from helping other people to fix the issue, I think it's problematic. As a consumer, I definitely value Freedom 2. Personally, I'm not sure I would consider it an ethical issue.

However, whether or not Freedom 2 is really an ethical issue, I think it's fairly straightforward to understand how people find Free software, as a whole, an ethical consumer rights issue. I'm not saying that everybody in the world is going to agree with the stance (and clearly many don't), but it's not much of a stretch to at least understand the position.

More edits for clarity. I should probably just go to sleep :-)

> if I have not supplied a binary to you (and hence you are not my customer), then I don't need to do anything for you. This is frequently confused by people.

The confusion is on your end. Section 3 of GPLv2 requires you make the source available to any third party, not just your customer (and GPLv3's provisions are similar).

There is exactly one set of circumstances that permit you to say "no" to any and all non-customers, and it involves not limiting the initial distribution to just binaries. That is, iff you provide binaries together with the source to the customer who's giving out copies of the binaries themselves, then it is their responsibility and not yours, and only in that instance are you allowed to turn down third-party requests for source. This would also hinge on having a customer who would be fine giving out copies of the binaries they received from you in step 1 but for some reason wants not to give out copies of the source code that they received with it.

This seems consistent with the letter of the licence. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

See also https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.htm...

I wouldn't have written my comment if it weren't.

Right, I was agreeing with you.

That's a good point and I'm glad you mentioned it. However, one set of circumstances is enough :-) If you do not wish to distribute the source code to other third parties, you do not need to, as long as you distribute it to your customers. I definitely could have described that better.

I think I see where you're coming from, at some point it becomes a question of semantics.

> the Affero GPL only differs in that I would have to give you source code (edit: previously typed "software") if I supply a binary for you to use over a network

That doesn't sound right. You don't have to distribute a binary for the Affero GPL to require you to release your source. From the FSF:

> The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html

Yes, the "them" refers to the users. If you have users of a binary server, you must allow those users to download the source code. You do not need to allow anyone who is not a user to do so, though.

Edit (programmer needs sleep badly): Clearly it doesn't have to be a binary. It's any executable over a network. But you don't have to give the source cod to everyone, that's really my only point :-)

The point is that merely communicating with it (i.e. GET / HTTP/1.0) suffices to establish that requirement, even if you are not serving or providing a binary over the network as you previously said.

I agree with you. I didn't mean to imply that the binary must be served over the network -- merely that the server is used over the network. The point I was trying to convey is that you only have to provide the source code to the users of the server -- not everybody in the world.

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