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Re: distinguishing between actual AGPL3 vs proprietary relicensing?



On 26/01/17 23:04, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 08:24:41AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> Seeing the discussion about db6 and AGPGL3 reminded me that there are
>> two styles of programs under AGPL3 and that pkgsrc doesn't distinguish
>> between them.
> 
> No, it doesn't matter. The AGPL3 is not a FOSS license, even part of it
> is "GPL". It doesn't matter if you can also buy a commerical license.
> It's not like you couldn't go to the FSF and ask them for a commerical
> license for GCC (whether or not they could agree is again beyond the
> scope). The point of the license tagging if there ever was one is to
> make sure that problematic packages are tagged. The mechanism does that.
> Making it more complicated doesn't change anything, beyond adding
> complexity.

I don't have an opinion about pkgsrc policy but there is a difference
between an AGLP3 program and an AGLP3 library. In the former case, the
program is the final product. You want improvements to be public. In the
other case, the library "contaminates" whatever code uses it, even
indirectly. AGPL3 is inadequate for libraries unless something fishy is
going on.

The case is similar to the distinction between GPL3 and LGPL3, but far
worse because the remote service clause.

I have spend hours and hours with Oracle during years about this.
Funnily bsddb3 has received an exception from Oracle (bsddb3 is not
AGPL3) because they use it and because they want others to use it. I
like Berkeley DB a lot, it is the best thing available, so in my new
programs I workaround the license segregating the database to another
process sharing memory for communication with the main program. Go figure.

My other fight back is to require programmers to read about the issue
when trying to install bsddb3 and set a funny environment variable to be
able to install it if the target db is db6.

That said, I don't have a suggestion about what pkgsrc should do about it.

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