[License-discuss] You need to pay to access AGPL3 scripts?

[John Cowan]

David Woolley scripsit:

> Not really about freedom then.  They lose the freedom to hide their
> upgrades, but you don't.  The tactic may be within the rules, but it
> seems against the spirit.   I though the real intent of the AGPL was
> to ensure that users could see the enhanced code, rather than as a
> way of feeding back to a privileged originator.

No, it feeds forward to a user, just like the GPL -- but "user" doesn't
have to be someone actually in possession of the code, unlike the GPL.
In any case, no license can limit the absolute freedom of the copyright
owner to do what they like with their own.

IMO, the question of SaaS, specifically remote computation as
a service, is the place where the Free Software bus goes off
the road and plunges to its doom in the ravine below.  Stallman
believes that the act of sending one's data to a system owned by
someone else for them to do something with it (not merely store
it or communicate it to others) is intrinsically unethical.  See
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html>
for his views on the subject.

What it boils down to is that Stallman not only wants us to be free, he
wants us *not* to be free to choose limited unfreedom, either.  If this
were really a principle and not just something specific to computing,
it would equally forbid me to send out my laundry to be washed, as in
principle (though not in practice, considering my lease) I could wash
it in my own washing machine.

> In any case, the originator can only use a clean room re-implementation
> of the enhancements if they want to retain the privileged position of
> being able to charge for their code.  If they include the upgrades as
> is, they are now downstream of an AGPL contributor and must use the
> AGPL rules.

Correct.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
You escaped them by the will-death and the Way of the Black Wheel.
I could not.  --Great-Souled Sam