“This is, in the current state of software licensing, no
replacement for actually reading and understanding the licenses,
but as a mechanism for quick (as opposed to deep) understanding it
seems to work well enough.“ComputerDruid pointed out that we’d need an icon for the
network-copyleft effect of the Affero-style licenses (AGPLv2 and
AGPLv3). The salient point of the GNU Affero General Public
Licenses is that the requirement to distribute source is also
triggered by interacting with the program over a network. The
license text has an addition (in version 3) to clause 13:“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
… an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your
version …“None of the licenses examined so far has such a clause, so
that’s why I hadn’t drawn one up yet.”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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