[freeside-devel] Licensing

[Ivan Kohler]

Hi,

Freeside will be changing license to the GNU AGPL v3 upon the final 
release of the v3 revision.

AGPL is a copyleft license, based upon the GPL, that closes the "webapp 
loophole".

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 sell access to them in a 
hosted/SaaS/ASP capacity to avoid having to make the source code of 
their derivitive works available.  This seems to violate the spirit of 
the GPL and copyleft, if not the letter (hence why it is called a 
"loophole").

Under the AGPL, companies would still be permitted to sell hosted 
access, as long as they made the source of their modifications 
available.

Interested parties are invited to particpate in the AGPL draft 
discussion: http://gplv3.fsf.org/agplv3-dd1-guide.html

Folks simply *running* Freeside (not selling hosted access to it) would 
be unaffected by this license change.

-- 
_ivan