Comments on the AGPL (and other licenses?) that close the "webapp" loophole

[ivan]

Hi,

Lately I've been thinking about switching to a license such as the
"Affero GPL".  The "Affero GPL" is a license based on the GPL that
"closes the web services loophole", like the someday-forthcoming GPLv3.  
One good summary of the AGPL is available at
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2002/3/20/154118/890

I want Freeside to be free for everyone to use and modify, but I don't
feel it is equitable to our community for large companies to fork
private versions of the software and run them in a VISP capacity to
avoid having to make the source code of their derivitive works
available.  This seems to violate the spirit of the GPL, if not the
letter (hence why it is called a "loophole").

This isn't a purely theoretical concern; at least one large wholesale
dial/VISP provider has run a private fork of Freeside for many years,
but has never made any of their modifications available.

If we adopted the AGPL license, no one could do this in the future, and
this company would not able to benefit from future community
improvements in Freeside unless they made their own changes available to
the community.

Several of the developers from this company are on the list - please
introduce yourselves and let us know your thoughts.

On the down-side, it may be more difficult to "borg" external codebases
such as RT and SQL-Ledger.  There's also the possibility that the AGPL
license would alienate potential contributors who would perceive it as
non-free - if anyone here would feel that way about contributing to
AGPL-licensed software, please share your thoughts.  As a data point,
although endorsed as a free license by the FSF and OSI, Debian still
seems undecided on whether the AGPL is DFSG-free.

Kristian, Jeff, any other folks who have made substantial contribution,
I'm especially keen to know your thoughts.  Do you feel this is
consistant with the spririt under which you contributed code to the
software and would you be okay with AGPL relicensing?

-- 
_ivan