Excerpts from Philipp Kern's message of 2014-05-07 15:00:43 -0700:
> On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 12:57:41PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > Philipp Kern writes ("Re: Ghostscript licensing changed to AGPL"):
> > > Does that mean that people calling one of these from a script or a web
> > > service (e.g. invoices using texlive-bin) will need to adhere to the
> > > AGPL as well?
> > Yes. But this isn't as bad as you think, because the source
> > availability requirement exists only if you modify the AGPL'd
> > software.
>
> So please excuse my ignorance here: But how does that work? How can we,
> as Debian, ensure that a user automatically complies with the license
> when a package is installed and spawns up a service on a port? (Or
> similarly, installs itself into a web server found on the system.)
>
> Should it then communicate that it is Debian version X and that the
> source can be found on any Debian mirror near you?
We don't ensure that users comply, we simply start them in a position
of compliance. If they change what we've given them, it is their
responsibility to remain in compliance. For the same reason, if they
modify the source of a program to link to an incompatibly licensed
library and build it, that is their prerogative.
The things that link to ghostscript as a library will now need to be
evaluated. If they are contacted via network ports, they'll need to
have source download capabilities added.
Where the AGPL fail to be clear, is when we ask what to do with a program
which listens over the network, and executes an AGPL licensed program. The
network user clause is far too vague to answer this question reliably,
and many organizations have simply punted on it and refuse AGPL entirely.
They're concerned about the risk that a loose interpretation could lead
to them being required to disclose _all_ of their source code.
Anyway, we just need to make clear that we're sending people AGPL
software. Its up to them whether or not to use it the right way. I do
think that the ghostscript developers are misguided, but from Debian's
perspective, it looks like the things that linked to GPL-2 libghostscript
can link to AGPL libghostscript.
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