"My recent column on open source citizenship, attracted more than the usual amount of email and weblog commentary. Lots of people are thinking about whether, and how, to coordinate inhouse development with open source projects. Licensing, employment agreements, open source culture and government policy are some of the issues raised in the follow-on discussion.
"With regard to licensing, several readers pointed out that a modified version of the GPL (GNU general public licence), the AGPL (Affero GPL), aims to close the GPL's 'web services loophole.' The AGPL adds a section to enforce sharing code that powers a web service, so if you host a web service based on a modified AGPL-licensed module, you have to guarantee your users the same access to source code that the original module guaranteed its users. Inhouse developers would often like to give back to open source projects, whether or not compelled by a licence to do so..."
