5 ms·

It's great to see the edX release! Good work guys! However, it's AGPL (Affero GPL) which is really quite an onerous license. As far as I understand it AGPL req

by andyjpb 13y ago

It's great to see the edX release! Good work guys! However, it's AGPL (Affero GPL) which is really quite an onerous license. As far as I understand it AGPL requires you to release your changes at the time you make them rather than at the time you distribute the resulting software. This will have a big impact on how useful the codebase is to anyone else. It'll be interesting to see how and which communities develop around it. The use of the AGPL will mean that it'll be slightly harder to form companies around edX solutions: there won't be much advantage of hosting/outsourcing companies over regular on-site consulting companies. I'd expect these licensing terms to result in most users (i.e. institutions) having to install and maintain their own solutions on site. As a result, I'd expect it to be more expensive than other existing open source LMS systems.

belorn 13y ago
That't a very stranger interpretation of the license. Here is the complete license text minus the GPLv3 itself (which explicitly do not include Remote Network Interaction): Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. Is it really that hard to read/interpret? It seems to me as very simple. If you use AGPL software and provide a service to users, and you have modified the software, then those users after accessing your service has a right to access the source code. If you don't modify it, or do not let users interact with the service, then you can happy ignore the (A)GPL part of the license and treat it as GPL.
- andyjpb 13y ago
  Yes. that's right. It's "simple". that doesn't mean it's not onerous tho'. It means that every time you put something into production you are required to do all the additional work of formalizing your changes and making sure that they're available. This significantly blurs the distinction between things that happen inside your organisation and things that happen at the interface of your organisation and the outside world, especially if your organisation is, say, a university and the people "inside" it are your students and you make your LMS based on this code available to them. The ?GPL software that a universities IT department is currently running is unlikely to be subject to terms such as these and it will cost a lot to put these processes in place and to maintain them. Compared to the GPL, it's quite a hard license to comply with.
  - belorn 13y ago
    What exactly is the complaint. Is it that AGPL require source for web services while GPL do not, or is it that some development practice is to use production trees as the development tree? Using a production tree as a development tree has many negative aspects. Student will see any compilation error, development bugs, spelling errors, Lorem Ipsum and other "inside" aspect of development. Having the actually code also available at that time might be inconvenient, but it is easily fixed. Don't develop on the production tree. First develop on a development tree and then once done, push to production. However, if the complaint is that AGPL require that users get source code... well, that's kind of the point of AGPL. It is the singular reason why it was created. If an universities IT department do not want student to have access to the LMS source code, then they need to decide what they least want to do. Spend money on hireing a developer to produce a similar program, spend money on a proprietary program that may or may not do what they want (minus customization), or accept giving student source code so they might read, learn, and maybe even be artistic and improve on. Three things student are sadly rarely allowed to do in universities.
  - dlitz 13y ago
    > Compared to the GPL, it's quite a hard license to comply with. Really? I don't see it. Compliance should be easy for any site where the source code already resides on the server (e.g. every Ruby on Rails, Node.js, or Python-based site). All you do is you provide an option to download the code that's running on the server. As long as you store secrets outside your source tree (e.g. put HMAC keys into /etc), this should be easy.
  - cypherpnks 13y ago
    Keep it in a public github repo. Voila! Instant compliance.
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by andyjpb 13y ago

belorn 13y ago

That't a very stranger interpretation of the license. Here is the complete license text minus the GPLv3 itself (which explicitly do not include Remote Network Interaction): Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. Is it really that hard to read/interpret? It seems to me as very simple. If you use AGPL software and provide a service to users, and you have modified the software, then those users after accessing your service has a right to access the source code. If you don't modify it, or do not let users interact with the service, then you can happy ignore the (A)GPL part of the license and treat it as GPL.

andyjpb 13y ago
Yes. that's right. It's "simple". that doesn't mean it's not onerous tho'. It means that every time you put something into production you are required to do all the additional work of formalizing your changes and making sure that they're available. This significantly blurs the distinction between things that happen inside your organisation and things that happen at the interface of your organisation and the outside world, especially if your organisation is, say, a university and the people "inside" it are your students and you make your LMS based on this code available to them. The ?GPL software that a universities IT department is currently running is unlikely to be subject to terms such as these and it will cost a lot to put these processes in place and to maintain them. Compared to the GPL, it's quite a hard license to comply with.
- belorn 13y ago
  What exactly is the complaint. Is it that AGPL require source for web services while GPL do not, or is it that some development practice is to use production trees as the development tree? Using a production tree as a development tree has many negative aspects. Student will see any compilation error, development bugs, spelling errors, Lorem Ipsum and other "inside" aspect of development. Having the actually code also available at that time might be inconvenient, but it is easily fixed. Don't develop on the production tree. First develop on a development tree and then once done, push to production. However, if the complaint is that AGPL require that users get source code... well, that's kind of the point of AGPL. It is the singular reason why it was created. If an universities IT department do not want student to have access to the LMS source code, then they need to decide what they least want to do. Spend money on hireing a developer to produce a similar program, spend money on a proprietary program that may or may not do what they want (minus customization), or accept giving student source code so they might read, learn, and maybe even be artistic and improve on. Three things student are sadly rarely allowed to do in universities.
- dlitz 13y ago
  > Compared to the GPL, it's quite a hard license to comply with. Really? I don't see it. Compliance should be easy for any site where the source code already resides on the server (e.g. every Ruby on Rails, Node.js, or Python-based site). All you do is you provide an option to download the code that's running on the server. As long as you store secrets outside your source tree (e.g. put HMAC keys into /etc), this should be easy.
- cypherpnks 13y ago
  Keep it in a public github repo. Voila! Instant compliance.

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