Re: [libreplanet-discuss] SaaSS

[Mike Gerwitz]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 17:31:29 -0700, Aaron Wolf wrote:
> As much as that is what Richard says, it downplays the significance of
> the AGPL. Because the AGPL requires that the source match the running
> version on the server, it goes beyond just providing the features for
> others to use. AGPL provides a requirement of transparency and
> accountability (albiet hard to enforce). It means that the software
> running on the server can be inspected even if you don't plan to use the
> features in running some software otherwise.

"Hard to enforce" is important there---if you can't observe the changes
in some way, you really can't prove that there are any.  It also doesn't
prohibit modifications as part of a pipeline.  All modern SaaSS is in
some way part of a pipeline (web server, load balancer, content cache,
CDNs, etc).  But even without, it's trivial to say "pre-process |
agpl-software | post-process"

The AGPL is useful, but it only handles a small part of what makes SaaSS
bad.

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker | GNU Maintainer
http://mikegerwitz.com
FSF Member #5804 | GPG Key ID: 0x8EE30EAB

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