A discussion on licensing and the AGPLv3

[Toshio Kuratomi]

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:

== Related to Staging ==

We use the staging environment for both some development duties and
integration testing.  Because of that we want to be able to deploy into
staging things that we aren't providing exact corresponding source for
at the moment.  The staging environment is reachable by members of the
general public but we'd like to find out if we can consider it an
internal service that doesn't need to track every little change we make.
 Here's the portions of the AGPL we think is relevant:

From the preamble:
"""
public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives
the public access to the source code of the modified version.
"""


Section 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 (if your version
supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding
Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source
from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary
means of facilitating copying of software.
"""

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

* 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?

* If we can run apps in staging without providing source to those
without shell accounts there, can we also run apps on publictest boxes
without providing source to those without shell accounts there?

-Toshio

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