On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 13:20 +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
While the GPL (any version) is not a trivial license, any hacker who is capable of writting a non-trivial program should be able to grasp it in an hour.
Perhaps "should", but they don't.
Still, it is a easy license compared to most other licenses, and the general ideas are easily grasped by the four freedoms of free software.
Compared to most other licences? I'm not sure about that. It's more complex than most BSD-like and Apache-style licences, which are a significant proportion of "other".
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.
I think that this is no different than a machine that I own that prohibits me from upgrading it.
Whereas I think it's no different to using a shell on a shared server.
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.
This clause has nothing to do with the Affero license though.
Er, yes it does - it's a clause in the original Affero licence, which was supposed to provide GPLv3 upgrade capability similar to the LGPL.
The Affero license isn't "substanitally equivalent" to GPLv3.
Indeed, so it looks like the Affero -> GPLv3 upgrade route is dead, since the original Affero doesn't mention the possibility of relicensing to the GNU Affero GPL.
Cheers,
alex.