> The AGPLv3 on the other hand, is a political and ethical line in the sand.
And a good way to completely scare away a good subset of potential users.
And a good way to completely scare away a good subset of potential users.
Perhaps the author feels like they are no-value users.
Due to the risks and complexity around these issues, and the high cost of "getting it wrong" either in one's analysis or in making a mistake, many firms choose to stay away from projects licensed with AGPLv3 even if they are actually intending to use the software in a way completely compliant with the license. Using it even the right way, safely, is viewed as too much of a risk.
The legal teams for many large companies recommend a company policy that prohibits using GPL and AGPL software outright - that's just using (running on company servers), not modifying, and not redistributing anything but the original version. Attaching a license like GPL or AGPL is a good way to kill enterprise use of a program even by companies that are conscientious about open source. See how Google views the AGPL, for example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sourc...
Perhaps it shouldn't be this way, and perhaps these legal teams are being overly cautious and someone should be push back, but that's how it is today at many companies. Attaching an AGPLv3 license means that I can't use it, while I can and do use Apache-licensed projects, and contribute improvements or fixes arising out of corporate usage.
However consider what they are building here: a mail client that purports to securely send and store email. Imagine you are working for a company that uses Mailpile. You think that your email is secure and encrypted because you are using Mailpile. Instead, you management has hacked in a back door to spy on your communications.
As you mentioned, perhaps someone should push back. I'm not involved in Mailpile, but it seems that this is exactly what they are doing. They are drawing a line in the sand and saying, "You must show your users any changes you have made to the system because otherwise how are they to trust it?"
It's clearly a tradeoff and also clearly not an easy decision. Do you give up a little bit of your goal of protecting users at the benefit of having wider exposure? Or do you refuse to compromise and suffer from potentially having less adoption? It doesn't seem that they took the decision lightly.
I don't think a license can solve this problem. I doubt someone who's willing to spy on people is afraid of breaking an open source license.
GPL on the other hand is about free and open source in product based software, and this do not conflict with Google's service based business model. This allow them to use GPL licensed copyrighted work which they have not authored, and distribute that to gain an competitive advantage in markets that supports their service based revenue source.
If a company do not have an identical business model, copying google will only cost the company. Either they will be overly cautious and the competition will produce cheaper and better way to produce revenue, or they will be overly receptive to legal actions. To make the car analogy, trying to drive exactly like someone else is going to make you crash into something. You need to make a analysis where your car is, and make decision based on the road and the traffic in relation to you.
Examples where AGPL makes little impact on a company revenues and commonly uses a webmail product: Internal use in a company, an ISP, or a dns/hosting provider.
The only thing this would prevent would be to offer a modified version of the software on a SaaS model without opening the code for its modifications.
Better to ban it from the organisation.
What does trigger that (which you somehow elided from your quote) is modifying the source. I must accept the license in order to modify the code as stated in section 9.
Having accepted the license I have a responsibility to offer the changes to all "users" interacting with it remotely. Very unfortunately, they don't provide a definition of "user". This may be intentional, though. There are legal definitions of the word "user" and it may not be possible/desirable to try to override the term in the license.
IANAL but in my experience, people who gain unauthorized access to software are not defined as a "user". I can't enter into a contract with an entity of whom I am unaware. There is a crucial difference between inviting people (even random people) to use the software and having a system that just happens to be accessible. There is a huge amount of case law on the topic, so if you are really curious I'm sure any lawyer can give you good advice.
And the licenses are 2 totally different animals anyhow... BSD license incidentally grants some freedom... but FSF's licenses are designed to protect it.
I measure freedom in the license context by how much I have to do using a certain licensed software.
MIT, BSDL, Apache, EPL -> nothing
AGPL -> I need to open up every single thing that touches the service that uses AGPL
Which one is more free? In my interpretation the former. Please convince me that AGPL is more free than the other licenses. On the top of all that jazz, I really dislike the GPL/Gnu agenda of defining freedom to me. Let me show you what is the definition of freedom:
"the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint."
Opening open source code that I have no intention to open up sounds pretty restraining to me and also it qualifies as hindrance...
And even then one can argue if the AGPL serves this best, because it also doesn't really help users if no-one offers services based on the software because they don't trust the legal situation.
- Yeah right, please explain this to my mom. She is a user of my software. Thank you in advance.
- Even if it was about my users you cannot re-define freedom for them aka same thing applies as I wrote above
- My users are also corporations and they banned AGPL
Checkmate. :)
I think you may be confusing your freedoms with your concrete possibilities (i.e what you can do).
Also, you need to distinguish the freedom of your users (X) from the freedom of the redistributors (Y). The (A)GPL licenses are about taking away some of Y to increase X.