Cloud Computing Forces Rethink On Free Software Licenses

Jeremy Allison in his article “GPL’s cloudy future” brings up some interesting points about how cloud computing will impact software licensing, free software and particularly the GPL license.

The main point of the GPL license is it is impossible to use it to create proprietary software. It’s deliberately designed that way by a man who views proprietary software as immoral…

But the fatal flaw in the GPL is that the reciprocal clause is only triggered by the act of redistribution. This works well in the world of traditional software, where in order to use a program it must be directly distributed to the recipient. Under the GPL, that person then inherits the same rights to the software source code as the distributor had. But now consider the strange new world of cloud computing, and software as a service. The way software works in this world is completely different. Most of the complex logic and the actual programs themselves live as software only running within server farms, communicating solely by network requests sent from a client Web browser via downloaded Javascript programs…

The FSF think they have the answer, and so in conjunction with Affero, they created the Affero GPL license (AGPL)…

Ref – GPL’s cloudy future