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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) this week released the second and "last call" draft of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3. Outside of the hard-core open source software (OSS) community, the AGPL has not received the same kind of attention as the FSF's GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3) released in June. There have been no Business Week or Forbes stories or Microbashing in the blogosphere.

But the AGPL may have more far-reaching effects on the entire IT community than the more heavily publicized GPL if it were widely accepted. That's because this is the ASP/SaaS-related FSF license. Here at O'Reilly is a timely explanation vis a vis Skype's recent problems but the concept applies to all mundane functionality SaaS-model companies as well.

Because SaaS is the software delivery model of the future just as OSS is the software development model of the future, the AGPL is actually more important than the GPL itself. The more SaaS-oriented startups depend on OSS the more likely they are to walk into this hornet's nest. The FSF itself says, "The GNU General Public License permits (developers to make) a modified version (of otherwise GPL-complaint software) and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public." The AGPL closes that loop.

That's probably why there is more internal OSS community bickering over it than there was over the GPL. Here is an article that describes two OSS gurus arguing about the subject years ago and here is a more recent example (one of the OSS gurus being the same).

Affero is (or was) a web server host in San Franciso that originally came up with the license in the early part of this decade with the help of the FSF and then turned over maintenance of the license to FSF. The simple intent of this version of AGPL is to make it consistent with version 3 of the GNU GPL but it is also opening up all the old wounds in the OSS community.

You can review the draft and provide your feedback at http://gplv3.fsf.org/agplv3-dd2-guide.html.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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