linux guy wrote:
Has the cronometer provided broken the rules of the GPL by enhancing it and turning it into a web application and not providing the course code back to the user base ?
If so, where and how should this be reported ?
The generally accepted answer (including by the FSF) is no: if they’re just providing their enhanced version as a web application on their own servers, they aren’t exactly distributing the program, so the source code doesn’t need to be made available.
The Affero GPL is a variant of the GPL which explicitly requires that the source code to the web application *is* made available to its users.
See also http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html (note that this talks about version 3 of both the GNU GPL and the Affero GPL, but there is also a version 2 of the Affero GPL which is a modified version of the GNU GPL version 2).
Hope this helps,
James.