Re: [Fsfe-uk] GPLv3 draft available

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 16:21 +0000, Lee Braiden wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 January 2006 08:55, Simon Waters wrote:
> > The Affero GPL is the appropriate licence if you wish to prevent code
> > being hoarded by ASPs, my reading is this won't change. Or did I miss
> > something?
> 
> What you may be "missing" is that, if I remember correctly, around when the 
> Affero license was launched, there was a lot of talk of it just being a 
> stop-gap license, until GPLv3 was done.  I was really hoping to see something 
> along those lines, for one.

Well, there is something there - you can, as an option, require an
Affero-style quine function to be permanently available (a quine is a
program which outputs its own source code). I think the idea is still
that the Affero be retired.

So, GPLv3 can be made to act like Affero if that is what you want, and
the draft remains as-is.

I have doubts about this clause, though. I think it works extremely well
for web applications written in interpreted languages; I don't think it
affects the freeness of a program in that regard. In other
circumstances, I think it works less well.

Also, it doesn't really address situations where the program is not
interpreted, or the interface is projected in some other way - a good
example would be running an application via an NX server. The basic
"problem" is still the same - user gets access to the application, but
not the source - but the solution given begins to falter (it becomes
progressively more difficult to make the quine-like function available
and useful as the app gets more complex).

I wonder if the GPLv3 over-generalises the clause. Maybe it should be
'If the application presents an HTML interface via a webserver, and that
interface has a quine function, you may not remove it'. I think both the
other situations, and the problems that people have raised with this
clause, are all basically non-interesting corner cases which do little
to increase freedom. 

I also think this aspect of the draft will be the most controversial,
and would have lit fires were it not for the fact that it's optional.

Cheers,

Alex.