Affero General Public License

[salesagility]

GPL and GPL3 have no license clauses that deal with software as a service distribution of code.

For SugarCRM type companies, this means that third parties can take the entire code base of SugarCRM, build on it, deliver it as a for-profit service ..... and never have to give a line of code back to the community.

A huge hole in Open Source licensing.

But today, the Free Software Foundations approved a new license ... Affero General Public License that closes this loophole.

Will SugarCRM move to this?

The smart money says "Yes".

[SugarDev.net]

The answer is Yes.

[salesagility]

Well, well ... congratulations Sugar!! (and thanks for the headsup Sugardev).

That's very interesting news. It certainly hurts business models like info@hand but the more interesting consequence may be the impact that a major player like sugar going AFGPL might have on the open source landscape generally. I haven't been keeping my eyes on who else has bought into it and apart from google's disgraceful decision to ban code licensed under afgpl from their project repositories, there hasn't been much news.

This may give afgpl 3 the momentum it needs.

Fantastic and well done sugarcrm!!!!

[SugarDev.net]

This move might prove to have a major impact on the CE community.

[salesagility]

Agreed ... and to be wished for ... there are some hugely encouraging signs and the noises from Sugar corporately leave me feeling more optimistic than I have for years.

[eggsurplus]

Just to further this thread along what are the major differences between the GPLv3 and AGPL?

[roblaus]

AGPL closes the SaaS loophole AFAIK.This means that you have to provide the source code even though you are hosting a solution. This is excluded from GPL3.

What I do not understand: Why are people are so enthusiastic about it? This kills part of Intellestreams business model. Is it a matter of purity? For Sugar GPL3 was just self defense against Whitehead and the Tiger boys. And I didn't see any improvement whatsoever after the move to GPL3. Somebody may explain please...

[salesagility]

To my mind it's a very good thing. Open Source thrives because the license enforces sharing of code where that code is distributed ... a good thing ... we all float higher on a rising tide.

AFGPL prevents the kind of parasitical activity where companies acquire wholesale blocks of business logic, that may have taken hundreds of man years to build, build what in effect becomes proprietary extensions, resells this as an added-value software as a service offering, competing against the organisation responsible for investing the time to build the original code and not giving so much as a line of code back to the project.

As software moves to the web, that kind of behaviour could kill open source stone dead. Why innovate when all you are doing is empowering a competitor?

AFGPL ensures that all distributed software, whether physically or as a service, is shared and available to the community.

[roblaus]

That may well be and I have nothing against it but again: where was the positive effect when Sugar moved to GPL3? I haven't seen any. To the contrary: Sugarforge is a big mess and getting worse everyday (and I do not mean only the maintenance but also the contributions). Sugar Exchange practically ceased to exist due to licensing issues.

Sugar's investors spent a lot of money which was used amongst other things to create the open source version. This was and is marketing only. Which is fine. Now they protect their investment against the aforementioned people. Also fine. But enthusiasm?

A good piece of of software takes 100s of man years to develop as you said correctly. And these 100s of years have to be paid by someone. If it's not the customer then who is it? This is my problem with Open Source...

[salesagility]

Apache
Linux
PHP
MySQL

They run the mission critical infrastructures for the world's largest organisations.

A good piece of of software takes 100s of man years to develop as you said correctly. And these 100s of years have to be paid by someone. If it's not the customer then who is it? This is my problem with Open Source...

As always, the customer pays ... but they pay less and have more choice and more freedom to innovate. And all the above products/companies or ecosystems that have grown around them are characterised (until their takeover by various traditional proprietary monoliths) by being robust strong and profitable .... and open source.

Open Source IS a business model that works. It produces outstanding software at a much lower cost than proprietary models and empowers customers in a way that proprietary software never can or could.