Bradley M. Kuhn

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When Will Hosting Sites Allow AGPLv3 Code?

Wednesday 23 July 2008 by Bradley M. Kuhn

At the OSCON Google Open Source Update, Chris Dibona reiterated his requirement to see significant adoption before code.google.com will host AGPLv3 projects (his words). I asked him to tell us how tall we in the AGPLv3 community need to be to ride this ride, but unfortunately he reiterated only the bar of “significant adoption”. I therefore am redoubling my efforts to encourage projects to switch to the AGPLv3, and for our community to build a list of AGPLv3'd projects, so that we can convince them.

Chris argues that including AGPLv3 would encourage of license proliferation. On their surface, his arguments seem to be valid. I don't like license proliferation, either. Indeed, I have been a proponent of reducing license proliferation since around 2000 — long before it was fashionable, and when the OSI itself was the primary purveyor of license proliferation. I'm very glad that everyone has gotten on the same page about this, and would certainly not want to change my position now that we've reached consensus.

However, AGPLv3 is not an example of license proliferation for three reasons. First, AGPLv3 is a license published by an organization (my old employers, the FSF) that has a 24 year history of publishing — indeed, inventing — the most popular and major licenses available in the FLOSS world. To compare them to (as some have) Nokia, who published merely a vanity license with an OSI rubber stamp is simply not a valid comparison.

Second, the history of AGPL itself shows that proliferation is not at work here. AGPL was first drafted and published in early 2002, and has been in constant use since then. It filled a niche for users who were clamoring for a specific license to address a clear concern related to software freedom. I grant that the license is adopted by a small community, but GPL itself started with minimal interest (i.e., only in the GNU project). Also, licenses that are “GPL plus various special exceptions” that deal with tightly confined areas are, similar to AGPLv3, of interest to only small groups currently. There is no reason to reject a license that has a strong level of interest in a small community, particularly if it is — as GPL+exceptions and AGPLv3 are — compatible with existing licenses like GPLv3. In these cases, we should understand the reasons its user community picks it. In the APGLv3 case, the license addresses important FLOSS principles under serious study by our community. Any license that is actually redundant couldn't pass this test; AGPLv3 can.

Finally, the AGPLv3 is the outcome of a public process in which Google itself (as well as many others) participated. Indeed, it was the original intent of the GPLv3 drafters to include the Affero clause in the GPLv3 itself. The committees (on which Google served) convinced RMS and other drafters to not include the clause, and that is why it was put into a separate license. We must consider the fairness issue: some members of the community asked us to not include the Affero clause in GPLv3; others wanted it. The parts of the community who didn't want the clause should be accepting of the idea that another publicly-audited license to address this concern should be published for the slighted community.

Therefore, in this post, I am asking for help: will someone maintain a website that specifically tracks AGPLv3 adoption (as opposed to other sites that try to track everything)? I was going to do it myself, but since I'm the author of the Affero clause and a primary advocate in AGPLv3 adoption, I think it would better if someone else did it. Please email me if you are interested in this volunteer task. I'll update this post once we have a team of folks willing to work on this.

Posted on Wednesday 23 July 2008 at 18:05 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

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