Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2008/07/23/agplv3-hosting.html

At the OSCON Google Open Source Update, Chris Dibona
reiterated his
requirement to see significant adoption
before code.google.com will host AGPLv3 projects (his
words). I asked him to tell us how tall we in the AGPLv3 community
need to be to ride this ride, but unfortunately he reiterated only
the bar of “significant adoption”. I therefore am
redoubling my efforts to encourage projects to switch to the AGPLv3, and
for our community to build a list of AGPLv3’d projects, so that we can
convince them.

Chris argues that including AGPLv3 would encourage
of license
proliferation. On their surface, his arguments seem to be valid. I don’t
like license proliferation, either. Indeed, I have been a proponent of
reducing license proliferation since around 2000 — long before it was
fashionable, and when the OSI itself was the primary purveyor of license
proliferation. I’m very glad that everyone has gotten on the same page
about this, and would certainly not want to change my position now that
we’ve reached consensus.

However, AGPLv3
is not an example of license proliferation for three reasons. First,
AGPLv3 is a license published by an organization (my old
employers, the FSF) that has a 24 year
history of publishing — indeed, inventing — the
most popular and major licenses available in the FLOSS world. To
compare them to (as some have) Nokia,
who published
merely a vanity license with an OSI rubber stamp is simply not a
valid comparison.

Second, the history of AGPL itself shows that proliferation is not at
work
here. AGPL
was first drafted and published in early 2002, and has been in
constant use since then. It filled a niche for users who were clamoring for a specific license to address a clear concern related to software freedom. I grant that the license is adopted by a small
community, but GPL itself started with minimal interest (i.e., only in
the GNU project). Also, licenses that are “GPL plus various
special exceptions” that deal with tightly confined areas are,
similar to AGPLv3, of interest to only small groups currently. There is
no reason to reject a license that has a strong level of interest in a
small community, particularly if it is — as GPL+exceptions and
AGPLv3 are — compatible with existing licenses like GPLv3. In
these cases, we should understand the reasons its user community picks
it. In the APGLv3 case, the license addresses important FLOSS
principles
under serious study by our community.
Any license that is actually redundant couldn’t pass this test; AGPLv3
can.

Finally, the AGPLv3 is the outcome of a public process in which Google
itself (as well as many others) participated. Indeed, it was the
original intent of the GPLv3 drafters to include the Affero clause in
the GPLv3 itself. The committees (on which Google served) convinced
RMS and other drafters to not include the clause, and that is why it was
put into a separate license. We must consider the fairness issue: some
members of the community asked us to not include the Affero clause in
GPLv3; others wanted it. The parts of the community who didn’t want the
clause should be accepting of the idea that another publicly-audited
license to address this concern should be published for the slighted
community.

Therefore, in this post, I am asking for help: will someone maintain a
website that specifically tracks AGPLv3 adoption (as opposed to other
sites that try to track everything)? I was going to do it myself, but
since I’m the author of the Affero clause and a primary advocate in
AGPLv3 adoption, I think it would better if someone else did it. Please
email me if you are interested in this volunteer task. I’ll update this
post once we have a team of folks willing to work on this.