Re: (A)GPL 3

On Sun, Aug 07, 2011 at 05:33:49PM +0200, Jonathan Schmidt-Dominé wrote:
> Today we seem to live in a cloudy world, thus there are new risks 
> regarding licensing which could make traditional copyleft totally 
> useless, that for there is the AGPL, couldn't it be officially allowed 
> in the licensing policies? When we want to have copyleft, we should be 
> able to protect the software using such a license, too. It is already 
> used inofficially by ownCloud, where the risk is obvious. It is 
> possible to use GPL code in AGPL programs.

This has been on my TODO since OwnCloud came along, we should probably
add a clause to the licence policy saying AGPL is allowed for web
services.  However I've not read the AGPL and I'm not too familiar
with the arguments for and against it (e.g. I hear Debian isn't a big
fan), nor do I understand how it can mix with GPL. So I think it needs
some discussion.

Besides OwnCLoud where do you think it would want to be used?

> Btw. (L)GPLv3 could be 
> allowed, too, e.g. protecting against tivoisation. Nowadays KDE 
> libraries get modularised and it gets ported to mobile platforms, thus 
> it may become feasible to use KDE-code on tivoisated platforms in 
> future, which can be addressed by those licenses.

The point of the licence policy is to keep the licences consistent,
this means code sharing is possible without worrying that you are
copying GPL 3 code into a GPL 2 file.  Also we link to at least one
GPL 2 only library (poppler) which won't work with GPL 3 only code.
So I think we should keep with GPL2+ until there is a significant
likelyhood of needing the extra protections from GPL 3.

Jonathan