A discussion on licensing and the AGPLv3

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Tue Jul 28 19:09:59 UTC 2009


On 07/28/2009 12:06 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On 07/28/2009 08:16 AM, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> 
>> Hopefully, this will provide a solid groundwork for Thursday's discussions.
>>
> 
> Excellent!  I think this provides some good options for us wrt
> distributing changes for production.  Are the questions about our
> staging and publictest environments still in discussion with legal?
> 
> In case those questions were missed, here they are again:

Q: Is the preamble legally binding/part of the AGPL or should we ignore
anything there?

Red Hat Legal advises that the preamble is not legally binding. It is
there only to provide some guidance as to how to interpret the binding
parts of the license. In general, Red Hat Legal advises that no one
should think too much about (A/L)GPL preambles. ;)

Q: admin.stg.fedoraproject.org is accessible by the general public but
it isn't meant for the general public's use -- it's for developers to
collaborate on what will be on the production site,
admin.fedoraproject.org.  Those developers collaborate over the internet
which is why it's available on the internet.  Does this excuse us from
providing source to people who do not have shell access to the server
itself?

Red Hat Legal says:
No.  However, I suppose you could solve the problem by writing an
additional permission that says that pushing the webapp to admin.stg.f.o
does not trigger AGPL sec. 13. (You could also word something more
broadly to allow downstream non-Fedora users to take advantage of the
same principle, in circumstances involving testing on public staging
sites, but it might be difficult to word that without creating a
loophole.)  This doesn't work if you start using
upstream-of-Fedora AGPL code.

~spot





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