Announce: Hspell 1.2

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 11:36 PM, Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>wrote:

> Dan Kenigsberg and I are proud to present version 1.2 of Hspell, the free
> Hebrew spell-checker and morphological analyzer.
>

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.


>
> From now on, it is licensed under the GNU AGPL version 3.
>
> The AGPLv3 (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html), which Hspell will
> now
> be using, attempts to close this loophole. Online software-as-a-service
> providers which derive their service from AGPL software (like Hspell), now
> need to make the source code of their service (or parts of it) available to
> their users. This will allow users that wish to do so to install the
> service
> on a different server, to better understand the service they are using,
> and even to modify it.
>

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Any qualified legal explanation will be appreciated - and, IMHO, on topic.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org <oleg at goldshmidt.org>
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