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Confession: I understand and like GPL2 and it makes a lot of sense to me as both a legal and logical thing, but over all these years I have never really understood exactly how GPL3 works or exactly what it is I'm agreeing to by using the GPL3
@mcc ah, with GPLv3, you are agreeing that all of RMS's 2001-2006ish views about installability and patent covenants are correct and should be perpetuated.
@fuzzychef @chrisjrn @mcc Narrator: He did not.
I guess the question is "against what?" but in my not-lawyerly opinion, no. The "2001-2006 views" is a good summary, I think. I'd be curious what @richardfontana would say, though.
@jzb
It completely missed the rise of SaaS, and spent too long focusing on the scourge of appliances (which, as it turns out are irrelevant if they're connecting to SaaSes)
@chrisjrn @jzb @fuzzychef @richardfontana Wait isn't agpl all about saas. Or does AGPL fail because it only works if the code is on the service side
@mcc
The AGPL wasn't RMS's work, that was primarily down to Bradley Kuhn; and it arguably remained a fork because RMS didn't think SaaSes were important
@chrisjrn
> AGPL ... arguably remained a fork because RMS didn't think SaaSes were important
I think it was @jxself I saw saying that a lot of FSF partisans thought the Affero clause ought to be folded into GPL itself. Can't remember what he said the reasoning was for not doing that, but the separate GNU Affero license was a compromise.
@lxo
> the user is the operator, and the AGPL would fail to respect the user's freedom
This is a great summary of an argument that needs a blog length explanation to make sense to me. Know of any you could link to?
Also any comment on the pair of posts starting here?
@mcc @chrisjrn @jzb @richardfontana The intention of the AGPL is to limit the ability to fork projects and launch them as services without sharing source code, yes. As far as I can tell, it's been effective for open source projects who want that; it was definitely good for CiviCRM.
Startups are less keen because what they want is money, not source code.
@fuzzychef @jzb @richardfontana Yeah correct but— I think? What @chrisjrn meant was a device/program which is useless without a closed source network service.
Imagine this scenario: Company A takes AGPL program B. They write ex nihilo a completely new program C which provides a feature for B via a net service. They add support for this new service to B. Does C escape a requirement to AGPL? I have not read the AGPL (only gpl2 and gpl3)
@mcc @jzb @richardfontana @chrisjrn That's definitely a lawyer question. And I'll bet the answer is "it depends".