http://blog.onlinegroups.net/2008/07/03/why-we-release-groupserver-as-open-source/ Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:59:40 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.1 hourly 1 http://blog.onlinegroups.net/2008/07/03/why-we-release-groupserver-as-open-source/comment-page-1/#comment-1144 Bevan Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:00:39 +0000 http://blog.onlinegroups.net/2008/07/03/why-we-release-groupserver-as-open-source/#comment-1144 Have you considered using the Affero GPL (aka AGPL)? I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the GPL does NOT require that third parties make freely available any of their modifications to source code, if the modified software is only distributed within that third party; Which includes deployment to a public-facing web server belonging to said third party in order to sell the modified software as a service. Such a competitor could thus add significant value-adding features to GroupServer, sell it as a service under a different name, and never be obliged to release those changes back to the GroupServer community. Yes this means that open source web tools are not well 'covered' by the GPL IRT the ability to enforce collaboration if or when required. At the end of the day the issue is that the GPL was designed for software that is distributed, compiled, redistributed, and executed all on the end user's machine. The GPL was not written with interpreted languages like PHP or server-side software that is not distributed to the end-user's machine in mind. Drupal has been a bitten by this issue in it's (ab)use by a certain popular web hosting vendor. If my understanding is correct, the issue I've outlined here was the motivation for the creation of Affero GPL, which covers this particular issue. The AGPL (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html) was created by Henry Poole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Poole) of CivicActions (http://www.civicactions.com/team/henrypoole), and Eben Moglen (http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/) of the Software Freedom Law Center (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/about/team/#eben) and the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/) -- who co-authored the GPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License). http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html) was created by Henry Poole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Poole) of CivicActions (http://www.civicactions.com/team/henrypoole), and Eben Moglen (http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/) of the Software Freedom Law Center (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/about/team/#eben) and the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/) — who co-authored the GPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License).]]>