On Sat, 2007-07-21 at 14:52 +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
How is the GPLv3 less friendly to hackers? And how exactly is it more complicated than the GPLv2?
It's longer and invents new language - it seems pretty factual to me that it's a more complex license, and the GPLv2 wasn't the most easily understood license in the first place (hence so many people making rudimentary mistakes like "You can't sell GPL'd software").
That's not saying it does that unnecessarily, but it does seem to be indisputable.
Without the GNU AGPL, we will have less means to protect our rights, so delaying it for a short or even forever would be a huge blow to free software.
Not everyone agrees that the right to see software source on someone else's machine you're using is a free software right; I'm not particularly sure I do.
The original Affero GPL isn't compatible with the GPLv3 after all...
That's a shame if it's not, they did build in a clause to make it compatible:
"You may also choose to redistribute modified versions of this program under any version of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License version 3 or higher, so long as that version of the GNU GPL includes terms and conditions substantially equivalent to those of this license."
Perhaps that upgrade route is dead now the Affero clause didn't make it into the GNU GPLv3.
Cheers,
Alex.