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I'm not familiar with the AGPL. Does this mean that I cannot modify the Diaspora source code to run on my server for my business needs, without giving join own

by jaekwon 16y ago

I'm not familiar with the AGPL. Does this mean that I cannot modify the Diaspora source code to run on my server for my business needs, without giving join ownership of my modifications to Diaspora? / without releasing the modifications to the public? OK that's a letdown.

drdaeman 16y ago
Yes, it means that you have to allow your users to access any modifications you did and freely use and redistribute them further under AGPL. The only problem I see here is site design - companies certainly won't like that their corporate style will be used freely. Hope this'll be worked around somehow (trademarking?) About the code itself - Diaspora is a distributed system, so IMHO it's quite absurd to attract users with some proprietary installation-unique features. Diaspora is more of a network, not a product. Imagine some ISP creating their own proprietary extensions to the TCP procotol - sounds weird, right?
- jarin 16y ago
  Actually it's not so absurd to want to build in proprietary features. Let's say Yahoo! wants to create their own seed for their users, but they want to tie the user accounts to their internal, confidential authentication systems. It is both completely disadvantageous for Yahoo and has absolutely no benefit for the OSS community for Yahoo to adopt Diaspora in that scenario. And I'm sure there are a lot of companies and developers out there who have unique features to add to their seeds that have absolutely no relevance to the main codebase or other developers.
  - drdaeman 16y ago
    I see no real problem with this. They just have to write dummy AGPLed adapter module, querying proprietary RPC service (or they can even use OpenID/OAuth internally). There won't be anything confidential more than curious user can find out, inspecting his browser's requests with completely proprietary service.

by jaekwon 16y ago

drdaeman 16y ago

Yes, it means that you have to allow your users to access any modifications you did and freely use and redistribute them further under AGPL. The only problem I see here is site design - companies certainly won't like that their corporate style will be used freely. Hope this'll be worked around somehow (trademarking?) About the code itself - Diaspora is a distributed system, so IMHO it's quite absurd to attract users with some proprietary installation-unique features. Diaspora is more of a network, not a product. Imagine some ISP creating their own proprietary extensions to the TCP procotol - sounds weird, right?

jarin 16y ago
Actually it's not so absurd to want to build in proprietary features. Let's say Yahoo! wants to create their own seed for their users, but they want to tie the user accounts to their internal, confidential authentication systems. It is both completely disadvantageous for Yahoo and has absolutely no benefit for the OSS community for Yahoo to adopt Diaspora in that scenario. And I'm sure there are a lot of companies and developers out there who have unique features to add to their seeds that have absolutely no relevance to the main codebase or other developers.
- drdaeman 16y ago
  I see no real problem with this. They just have to write dummy AGPLed adapter module, querying proprietary RPC service (or they can even use OpenID/OAuth internally). There won't be anything confidential more than curious user can find out, inspecting his browser's requests with completely proprietary service.