AGPL: Open Source Licensing in a Networked Age
When the reforged GNU General Public License, Version 3 (GPLv3) was finalized and released to an expectant public on June 29, 2007, the most important decision may have been one postponed. With the third iteration of the most popular open source license, the Free Software Foundation tackled weighty questions relating to software patents, license compatibility and hardware restrictions. But the question on the minds of many in the public comment period was whether they would tackle the considerably more problematic issue of the so-called “ASP loophole.”
They did not.
Simply stated, this refers to the fact that Software-as-a-Service or Web 2.0 applications fail to trigger the most important reciprocal protections afforded by the GPL because they are not, according the GPL’s definition of the term, “distributed.” What this means in practice is that companies such as Amazon, eBay, Google and so on - Application Service Providers, as they might have been called in years past - are free to consume GPL assets and make modifications to them without the obligation of sharing them under the same terms.
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