Red Hat just erected a paywall in front of the source code to their Linux distribution.Are they burning bridges to the wider open source ecosystem?Referenced...
An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.
The AGPL stands for the Affero General Public License. Similar to the GNU General Public License (GPL), the AGPL is a free software license, but it has an additional provision related to software run over a network.
In many ways, the AGPL is very similar to the GPL. It was designed to ensure that the software it covers remains free and open source, and that users have the ability to use, modify, and distribute the software.
However, there’s a key difference between the AGPL and the GPL: the AGPL has a specific requirement that if you run the software on a network server and modify it, you must offer the source code of your modified version to the network’s users. This requirement is meant to cover what’s sometimes called the “Application Service Provider loophole” in the GPL.
This “loophole” arises because the GPL requires you to share the source code of a modified version of a program only if you distribute the program. However, if you run a modified version of a program on a server and let users interact with it over a network (for instance, by providing it as a web service), you’re not technically distributing the program according to the GPL, so you’re not required to share your modifications.
Oh and then there is the AGPL:
The AGPL stands for the Affero General Public License. Similar to the GNU General Public License (GPL), the AGPL is a free software license, but it has an additional provision related to software run over a network.
In many ways, the AGPL is very similar to the GPL. It was designed to ensure that the software it covers remains free and open source, and that users have the ability to use, modify, and distribute the software.
However, there’s a key difference between the AGPL and the GPL: the AGPL has a specific requirement that if you run the software on a network server and modify it, you must offer the source code of your modified version to the network’s users. This requirement is meant to cover what’s sometimes called the “Application Service Provider loophole” in the GPL.
This “loophole” arises because the GPL requires you to share the source code of a modified version of a program only if you distribute the program. However, if you run a modified version of a program on a server and let users interact with it over a network (for instance, by providing it as a web service), you’re not technically distributing the program according to the GPL, so you’re not required to share your modifications.
The AGPL was designed to close this loophole.