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I wonder why the RPL isn't more popular for this. It's an OSI-approved license that is meant to fix the "SAAS loophole": PREAMBLE The Reciprocal Public Licens

I wonder why the RPL isn't more popular for this. It's an OSI-approved license that is meant to fix the "SAAS loophole": PREAMBLE The Reciprocal Public License (RPL) is based on the concept of reciprocity or, if you prefer, fairness. In short, this license grew out of a desire to close loopholes in previous open source licenses, loopholes that allowed parties to acquire open source software and derive financial benefit from it without having to release their improvements or derivatives to the community which enabled them. This occurred any time an entity did not release their application to a "third party". While there is a certain freedom in this model of licensing, it struck the authors of the RPL as being unfair to the open source community at large and to the original authors of the works in particular. After all, bug fixes, extensions, and meaningful and valuable derivatives were not consistently finding their way back into the community where they could fuel further, and faster, growth and expansion of the overall open source software base. While you should clearly read and understand the entire license, the essence of the RPL is found in two definitions: "Deploy" and "Required Components". Regarding deployment, under the RPL your changes, bug fixes, extensions, etc. must be made available to the open source community at large when you Deploy in any form -- either internally or to an outside party. Once you start running the software you have to start sharing the software. Further, under the RPL all components you author including schemas, scripts, source code, etc. -- regardless of whether they're compiled into a single binary or used as two halves of client/server application -- must be shared. You have to share the whole pie, not an isolated slice of it. In addition to these goals, the RPL was authored to meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition as maintained by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5 https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5

tannhaeuser 8y ago
Interesting. I guess the RPL however is as toothless as the AGPL when it comes to extend its scope to the provisioning software cloud providers use to run your AGPL-licensed software for their customers, which is the problem I believe MongoDB, Inc. wants to target.
- jbeard4 8y ago
  IANAL, but I guess this comes down to the interpretation of "Required Components". 1.12 "Required Components" means any text, programs, scripts, schema, interface definitions, control files, or other works created by You which are required by a third party of average skill to successfully install and run Licensed Software containing Your Modifications, or to install and run Your Derivative Works. You have to make the source of the required components available under the RPL (section 6.0-6.1). Would provisioning software to operationalize a database within a cloud environment be considered a "required component"? Maybe. If the cloud provider made modifications to the db source to get it to run well inside of their cloud environment, and did it in a way that made it impossible to run the modified db outside of their cloud environment, without using their custom provisioning scripts, then I would argue that those provisioning scripts would be considered "required components" under the definition in 1.12. But if they are able to run the db without making modifications to it, so that it is the same as upstream, and a third party developer does not need the provisioning scripts to run the modified db, then the provisioning scripts would not be considered required components. So, the RPL is perhaps stronger than the AGPL, but not strong enough for MongoDB or Redis Labs.
tomjen3 8y ago
Has the requirement to share source code to other programs ever been tested in court? For example, based on that could I release a web server and then sue anybody who wouldn't provide source code to their browser to me?
- jbeard4 8y ago
  I don't know about RPL, but GPL has been tested a lot. For example, in the early 2000s, Linksys was forced to release the source code of their router firmware. This project was forked and is now maintained in the OpenWrt embedded linux distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt Here is a list of GPL enforcement cases from the Free Software Foundation: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/GPL%20Enforcement%20Cases https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/GPL%20Enforcement%20Cases

tannhaeuser 8y ago

Interesting. I guess the RPL however is as toothless as the AGPL when it comes to extend its scope to the provisioning software cloud providers use to run your AGPL-licensed software for their customers, which is the problem I believe MongoDB, Inc. wants to target.

jbeard4 8y ago
IANAL, but I guess this comes down to the interpretation of "Required Components". 1.12 "Required Components" means any text, programs, scripts, schema, interface definitions, control files, or other works created by You which are required by a third party of average skill to successfully install and run Licensed Software containing Your Modifications, or to install and run Your Derivative Works. You have to make the source of the required components available under the RPL (section 6.0-6.1). Would provisioning software to operationalize a database within a cloud environment be considered a "required component"? Maybe. If the cloud provider made modifications to the db source to get it to run well inside of their cloud environment, and did it in a way that made it impossible to run the modified db outside of their cloud environment, without using their custom provisioning scripts, then I would argue that those provisioning scripts would be considered "required components" under the definition in 1.12. But if they are able to run the db without making modifications to it, so that it is the same as upstream, and a third party developer does not need the provisioning scripts to run the modified db, then the provisioning scripts would not be considered required components. So, the RPL is perhaps stronger than the AGPL, but not strong enough for MongoDB or Redis Labs.

tomjen3 8y ago

Has the requirement to share source code to other programs ever been tested in court? For example, based on that could I release a web server and then sue anybody who wouldn't provide source code to their browser to me?

jbeard4 8y ago
I don't know about RPL, but GPL has been tested a lot. For example, in the early 2000s, Linksys was forced to release the source code of their router firmware. This project was forked and is now maintained in the OpenWrt embedded linux distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt Here is a list of GPL enforcement cases from the Free Software Foundation: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/GPL%20Enforcement%20Cases https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/GPL%20Enforcement%20Cases