<div dir="ltr"><font face="georgia,serif"><br></font><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 11:36 PM, Nadav Har'El <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nyh@math.technion.ac.il">nyh@math.technion.ac.il</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Dan Kenigsberg and I are proud to present version 1.2 of Hspell, the free<br>
Hebrew spell-checker and morphological analyzer.<br></blockquote><div><br>I am, as ever, in bewildered awe of this kind of commitment to the project and the ability to maintain and continue to develop it in the face of temporary difficulties like day jobs, families, and so on.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<br>
>From now on, it is licensed under the GNU AGPL version 3.<br>
<br>
The AGPLv3 (see <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html" target="_blank">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html</a>), which Hspell will now<br>
be using, attempts to close this loophole. Online software-as-a-service<br>
providers which derive their service from AGPL software (like Hspell), now<br>
need to make the source code of their service (or parts of it) available to<br>
their users. This will allow users that wish to do so to install the service<br>
on a different server, to better understand the service they are using,<br>
and even to modify it.<br></blockquote><div><br>I must admit that until now I have not heard of AGPL. So I went to the link above and tried to gather the long lost skills of legalese I might have possessed in the past, and I failed miserably. Using FLOSS/GPL/whatever in software that you never distributed (i.e., running a hosted service) was never a problem, and GPL, among others, was pretty clear about it. I was in such a situation many times, and I am in such a situation now, since my employer offers hosted software service (in effect). Now AGPL "attempts to close the loophole", and I am struggling to understand what it means.<br>
<br>Given the (controversial, as distinguished from justifiable) GPL notion of "derived work" covering essentially anything that is linked to a GPLed piece of software, AGPL seems to gloss over the issue. What constitutes a "covered work" is not clear. If I host a service that has hspell.so (or whatever) as a part of it, do I need to offer source code - or indeed, object code - to the whole service to my customers, or only of hspell.so itself (modified or not)? A line seems to be drawn at the "system library" boundary, but this seems to be narrow to the point of obviousness. In several places, the License refers to "the entire work", which is undefined (first used in Section 5) and smells of GPL-like "everything that is linked" without saying so.<br>
<br>Furthermore, looking at Section 13, if I modify hspell.so, I am supposed to offer the source code of what exactly to normal *users* of my service (that is, people/organizations I do *not* "convey" the software to)? All of my code as well? Just of the modified code of hspell.so? What if I don't modify hspell.so but instead load my own little library that wraps the original hspell.so and uses it normally (this and the rest of this paragraph is an intellectual exercise, not a crucial point)? If I run an "hspell daemon" in a separate process (meaning that all the interaction with it is through "system libraries") am I OK? What about a separate thread? Not OK? Assume some trick like that makes me compliant and happy since I can keep my software proprietary (and, to boot, hspell not interacting with anything other than "system libraries"). What is the point of having me jump through these technological loops?<br>
<br>Some clauses of the License seem to presume that higher level legal provisions (read, laws) could be made inapplicable or waived in a blanket manner, regarding of jurisdiction, merely by saying something generic in the License itself. This is presumptuous and probably invalid in most cases, which may be OK (as in ignored) but adds to the general vagueness and manifest lack of care.<br>
<br>1) IANAL. 2) I obviously do not presume to question the authors' choice of a license for their software. As a potential user of hosted FLOSS (though probably not hspell), however, I should say that at this point AGPL seems to me sloppy, not very well thought through, carelessly formulated, and therefore dangerous. It says, "stay away," even if it is not really "more viral than GPL" (as it seems to be, frankly). I would argue against using any AGPL software as a part of a hosted service, while continuing to support GPL under similar circumstances. I wonder, therefore, if using AGPL helps or hurts promoting the licensed software in SaaS deployments.<br>
<br>Any qualified legal explanation will be appreciated - and, IMHO, on topic.<br><br></div></div>-- <br>Oleg Goldshmidt | <a href="mailto:oleg@goldshmidt.org" target="_blank">pub@goldshmidt.org</a><br>
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