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● 08.21.22

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●● Is Lying About the AGPL Considered ‘Good for Business’ Now?

Posted in FUD, GPL at 1:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 95c30cd2fef7ee402d3264bc21c6b145AGPL FUD? Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

=> ↺ Video download link

http://techrights.org/videos/agplv3-fud.webm

Summary: Fear-mongering and FUD tactics are used to oversell or overcharge for use or some particular piece of software; some packagers and maintainers aren’t too happy about this…

THE GAFAM companies, including Gulag that resorted to blacklisting, do not like AGPL. It compels them to stop hoarding without giving anything back. Does that make the AGPL evil? Or risky? Or undesirable? No, it just generally protects developers from having their work ‘stolen’ by monopolies. AGPL is a response to real-world scenarios in the era of ‘clown computing’ (and “SaaS”/”IaaS” as it was known back then).

We recently became aware, for a couple of days in a row as a matter of fact [1, 2, 3], that one project went out of its way to misrepresent the AGPL, specifically AGPLv3, i.e. a licence from 15 years ago (also the latest of its kind). Here are screenshots of what’s presented by the project:

=> 1 | 2 | 3

Image: AGPLv3 licence

Image: AGPLv3 choose licence

Image: AGPLv3 combined works

They’re playing into the “viral” smear (a derogatory term like “contamination”), characterising the licence as more ‘viral’ than it is.

All of our code is, by default, AGPLv3-licensed. We chose the licence because it is effective at maintaining software freedom. As the video above (and the links) can show, misleading words about “combined work” may lead users to thinking that their “liabilities” go a lot further than they really are.

It’s possible to use and even modify AGPLv3-licensed software without taking a “commercial” licence. It doesn’t impact “combined work”, either. The FUD is subtle, implicit, but it’s still there. We chose not to name the project in question. Shaming it won’t be constructive. █

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