Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2008/09/04/netservices-source-culture.html
with autonomo.us.
So often, a particular strategy becomes dogma. Copyleft licensing
constantly allures us in this manner. Every long-term software freedom
advocate I have ever known — myself included — has spent
periods of time slipping on the comfortable shoes of belief that
copyleft is the central catalyst for software freedom.
Copyleft indeed remains a successful strategy in maximizing software
freedom because it backs up a community consensus on software sharing
with the protection of the law. However, most people do not comply
with the GPL merely because they fear the consequences of copyright
infringement. Rather, they comply for altruistic reasons: because it
advances their own freedom and the freedom of the people around
them.
Indeed, it is so important to remember that many of the FLOSS
programs we use every day are not copylefted, and do not actually have
any long-term proprietary forks (for me, Subversion, Trac and Twisted come to mind quickly).
Examples like this helped me to again re-eradicate some clouded
thinking about copyleft as central tenant.
With this mindset fresh, Mike Linksvayer and I had an excellent
discussion last month that solidified this connection to network
services, and specifically, the licenses for network services software.
Many GPL’d network service software give no source to users, but that
may have little to do with the authors’ “failure to
upgrade” to the AGPL. In other words, the non-source
availability of network service applications that are otherwise licensed
in freedom is probably unrelated to the lack of network-freedom
provisions in the license.
In fact, more likely, the network service world now mimics the early
days of the BSD licenses. Deployers are “proprietarizing”
by default merely because there is no social effect to encourage
release of modified source. Often, they likely
haven’t considered the complex issues of network service freedom, and
are following the common existing practices. Advent of the GPL
did help encourage software sharing in the community, but the
general change in social standards that accompanied the GPL probably had
a more substantial impact.
Therefore, improved social standards will help improve source sharing
in network services. We need to encourage, and more importantly,
make it easy for network service deployers to make source of
network applications available, regardless of their particular FLOSS
license. No existing non-AGPL FLOSS licenses
prohibit making the source available to network
users. Network providers can and should simply do it voluntarily out
of respect for their users. Developers of network service software,
even if they do not choose the AGPL, should make it easy for the
deployers to give source to their users. I hope to assist in this
regard more directly before the end of 2008.