On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 18:45 +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
Compared to most other licences? I'm not sure about that. [GPLv3]'s more complex than most BSD-like and Apache-style licences, which are a significant proportion of "other".
I suppose that is what I get for being vauge, by most other licenses, I was refering to non-free software licenses.
Ah, ok. I suspect MJ's point was related to other free software licences, but he can clarify that if not.
Well, then I can only assume that you think what Tivio did is ok? Since that is one way to look at it, a hardware with a shell that the company is providing access to.
No, I think they're objectively different situations. With Tivo, they were selling hardware that had modified free software on them: the user, having purchased the hardware, was unable to change the software on it, but Tivo could.
With a shared shell, I'm not buying the hardware - I've bought a service. That's very different - it's like buying web hosting, or something like that. Personally, if I buy web hosting service, I don't expect the host to offer me the source to their Apache, for example.
So, primarily, I don't see that web applications should get special treatment, and I wouldn't like to see such a feature in (e.g) CLI applications. But second, I just don't see how it's a free software issue. If I don't give someone a copy of a piece of software, then I shouldn't have an obligation to them, and I don't see why people should be forced to give out copies of software. It's completely different to the Tivo situation, where they actually _are_ distributing the software.
Cheers,
Alex.