Dear developers, I respectfully submit this general resolution proposal to your consideration. (this GR proposal supersedes the proposal in <20090318235044.ga30...@yellowpig>)
Asking for seconds, (please CC me) Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> This General Resolution is made in accordance with Debian Constitution 4.1.5, however it overrides a decision of the FTP masters made in <87k5aovzzi....@delenn.ganneff.de> [1]. [1] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/11/msg00097.html ========= Text of the GR =================== The Debian project resolves that softwares licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License are not free according to the Debian Free Software Guideline. ========= End of the text ================== RATIONALE (to be amended if necessary): 1. The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is essentially the GNU General Public License with the following additional clause reproduced below. See http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl.html for the full text of the license. "" 13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License. "" 2. This clause is incompatible with Section 3. of the Debian Free Software Guideline: 2.1 This clause restricts how you can modify the software. Doing a simple modification to a AGPL-covered software might require you to write a substantial amount of extra code to comply with this clause. 2.2 This clause forces the developer modifying the software to incur cost. A developer modifying the software and distributing the modified version need to incur the cost of providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server as long as at least one person is using the software and this for all published modifications, even long after the developer stopped using and/or distributing the software. 2.2. While this clause does restrict mere use of the software, instead it creates liabilities for people modifying the software, even if they distributed their modified version in source form, with respect to the way the software perform on user systems. -- Modifying the software can unwillingly introduce a bug that cause it not to comply with this clause. -- A user of the modified version can mis-install it, mis-configure it or run it in an untested environment where it does not comply with this clause. -- A user of the modified version can use it in a configuration that cause it to fail to comply with this clause (for example using a reverse proxy that remove link to the source code from the html output). 3. This clause is incompatible with Section 6. of the Debian Free Software Guideline. 3.1 This clause does not allow you to modify the software to perform tasks where complying with it is not technically feasible, for example: -- The code is modified to run on an embedded system with tight size limit. -- The code is modified to interact with the user using a network connection with extremely low throughput. -- The code is modified to interact with the user using a network protocol that does not allow to display a prominent offer.
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