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Message from discussion AGPL license
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Michael R. Bernstein  
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 More options Apr 11 2008, 11:37 am
From: "Michael R. Bernstein" <mich...@fandomhome.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:37:21 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Fri, Apr 11 2008 11:37 am
Subject: Re: AGPL license
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On Apr 10, 3:34 pm, "Chris DiBona" <cdib...@google.com> wrote:

> Basically the answer is when I, Fitz, Greg or the team think it is
> popular enough. I know you guys think we don't like it for nefarious
> reasons, but what you're missing is we dislike -all- new licenses that
> are unpopular. They lead to bifurcation of the open source development
> world and that is a high price to pay.

Chris, please don't attribute motivations to me that you don't have
evidence for.

Generally speaking, I actually agree with your position, except that
license proliferation per se isn't really the larger part of the
problem, which is the combinatorial complexity of license
compatibility. Of course, to a first approximation, license
proliferation is a pretty good proxy for this, given that many
licenses aren't written with maximum compatibility in mind. Also,
license proliferation does directly introduce confusion into the
license selection process, but that's a relatively minor effect.

> I personally think the AGPL is deeply flawed, and I've commented on
> that on my own blog and on others, but that really -doesn't- matter.

I have my own problems with the AGPL, but for what I want to
accomplish, it's the best license available. However, that really
doesn't matter either.

> If the AGPL gets to be popular, like lgpl or bsd popular, than we'll
> certainly offer it as an option on code.google.com, but until then,
> it'll be a judgment call on our part. One you might not agree on, but
> that's okay.

Umm. Actually, I'm fine with it being a judgement call. But I'd at
least like some clarity as to at what point you'd *start* considering
it. I don't think leaving the lower bound of consideration undefined
is going to be helpful to you, but that is your privilege. You will
get increasing numbers of "are we there yet?" queries over time,
though.

However, given the definition you just gave for a 'certainly'
boundary, here is my attempt to put a solid number on it:

There are 19k projects in SourceForge WWW/HTTP category. Of these, 13k
are GPL, 1.3k are BSD, and 2k are LGPL. Four are AGPL (but 15 out of
all projects). However, I am also aware of three GNU AGPL projects
that are inside SF marked as "Other/Proprietary License", and there
may be others.

Meanwhile, on Google Code, I see 72 projects labeled GPL, 35 BSD, and
16 LGPL. This doesn't seem right, so I use general search instead, and
get 351 GPL, 189 BSD, and 92 LGPL. Still seems low. How many hosted
projects are there, anyway?

Another issue is that few of the new projects that I find interesting
use SF for project hosting. Instead, these projects tend to get
started on Google Code (which forbids AGPL) or some combination of
Trac and Subversion (frequently self-hosted). I don't have a way of
doing the same kind of GPL/LGPL/BSD licensing census on those.

What I *can* do, is try to compile a list of all AGPL projects I can
find.

So, here's the question: How many AGPL projects in the wild (which
will typically be new web app projects) would meet your "lgpl or bsd
popular" standard?

- Michael


 
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