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The future of software is in cloud computing," says Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, a company that provides mobile services. And if free and open source software (FOSS) is going to survive in that emerging market, he says, then the community needs to adjust by promoting greater use of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), a license specifically crafted for software as a service.
"The GNU Affero General Public License or GNU AGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. The GNU AGPL is similar to the GNU General Public License, except that it has an additional section to cover use over a computer network. It closes what is commonly known as the Application service provider loophole of the GNU General Public License.
"...After months of hard work, AGPL v3 has been finalized by the Free Software Foundation. [...] Funambol is obviously the first commercial open source company to embrace AGPL v3. I am happy to announce that our upcoming GA release of Funambol 6.5 will be based on AGPL v3. I believe AGPL will save open source..."
After 18 months of widespread consultation with community and corporate interests, the third versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) were released one year ago on 29 June 2007. In November, they were joined by the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).
"As of right now all DreamHost customers have a new option for hosting Ruby on Rails applications. Awhile back I asked for a better way to host Rails applications on a shared server, and the answer has come in the form of Passenger (also known as mod_rails)!
Google open source guru Chris DiBona says that the web giant continues to ban the lightning-rod AGPL open source license within the company because doing so "saves engineering time" and because most AGPL projects are of no use to the company.
According to the Affero General Public License (AGPL), Saigonica must allow users to download the ‘modified’ version of this software. Furthermore, Saigonica MUST NOT remove the Source link from their Laconica site. By removing the Source link, Saigonica has openly violated of the AGPL.
It is supported by many that the AGPL license for network services which run in a cloud brings back the fairness provision that the original GPL intended and returns the freedom that FLOSS promises to all users and developers. But does the APGL license really provide all that?
No one can be involved in the free software community to any extent without stumbling across conspiracy theorists. Like the mad wife in the attic, they’re an embarrassment to the community, clinging to attitudes appropriate to the days when free software was new and vulnerable, and providing an easy means for outsiders to discredit the rest of the community.
