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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Thread was about software options for "syncing" smartphones with calendar/mail servers (more or less).
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <[email protected]> -----
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:20:36 -0700 From: Rick Moen <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Linux (sendmail/imap) and Mobile Phone accessQuoting James Harper ([email protected]):
> According to Slashdot, Zarafa has just been open sourced.
Rules of thumb:
1. Be skeptical of any claim that a Web 2.0 application is open source until you've carefully examined the actual licence. There's been an extremely large amount of cheating, deception, and outright lying about licensing in this market.
2. Be doubly, super-skeptical of those claims when you go through the project's Web front page and find three claims of open sourcing but nothing whatsosever about the licence.
In this case, a great deal of digging, one finally, on a subpage, finds a Sept. 18 press release saying that the "full core" of the Zarafa platform will be at some unspecified time be available under Affero GPLv3. Affero GPLv3 is indeed a genuinely open source licence targeted at the Web 2.0 / SaaS / hosted-software / ASP market -- even though it isn't yet OSI-certified.
The real remaining question, then, is whether the "full core" -- whatever that means -- will be turn out to be a viable, useful piece of software. Another scam that's extremely common in Web 2.0 space is to have a deliberately buggy, undocumented, incomplete "community" version under open source licensing, functioning strictly as a sales come-on to upsell users to a "commercial" (proprietary) version.
I'm trying to remember the leading example. Hmm, Sug[censored for reasons of legal self-defence]
If you want to know without doing a pilot installation of your own, wait for comments on the Debian package. ;->
----- End forwarded message -----
Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]
2008/9/22 Rick Moen <[email protected]>:
> Thread was about software options for "syncing" smartphones with > calendar/mail servers (more or less). > > > I'm trying to remember the leading example. Hmm, Sug[censored for > reasons of legal self-defence] > > If you want to know without doing a pilot installation of your own, wait > for comments on the Debian package. ;-> >
I doubt there'll be one; not from Debian itself, at least - the licence is, as you noted, Affero GPL, which Debian do not consider free (because the additional terms beyond those required by the 'regular' GPL fall into what Debian consider to be restrictions on the mere use of the software).
I personally assume that their decision to relicence was motivated by the progress in the OpenChange project, which seems likely to leapfrog them shortly.
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Quoting Jimmy O'Regan ([email protected]):
> I doubt there'll be one; not from Debian itself, at least - the > licence is, as you noted, Affero GPL, which Debian do not consider > free (because the additional terms beyond those required by the > 'regular' GPL fall into what Debian consider to be restrictions on the > mere use of the software).
Noted -- for ambiguous and rather doubtful values of "Debian". That is, no officer or ruling body of the Debian Project has ever so ruled, nor have the ftp masters opined to that effect. What you (probably) really mean is that some number of the subscribers to the unmoderated public mailing list debian-legal, a mailing list that in no way speaks Debian's institutional opinion and is also an absolute magnet for licensing cranks, posted views to that effect.
Unfortunately (in my opinion), some of the louder members of that mailing list have created, via mailing list postings and Web pages, the false impression that they are voicing the collective view of Debian itself, when they issue such opinions. In fact, the only authoritative signs of Debian's stance on licensing issues are approved General Resolutions, rulings of the Technical Committee, decisions of the DPL or his/her deputies, or uncontested refusals of the ftp masters to accept a submitted package.
And, for what it's worth, I do think the not-really-Debian's opinion you allude to is pretty cuckoo: The "restriction on use" is nothing more than an obligation to offer public access to matching source code, if/when a user deploys the covered ASP code for public use -- updating the historic idea of copyleft for ASP/SaaS scenarios, in which conventional copyleft mechanisms don't work.
There are of course, indeed, people who think such codebases are non-free, just as there have always been large groups of open source people who think copylefted code is non-free. I just think both are dead wrong.
Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]
2008/9/22 Rick Moen <[email protected]>:
> Quoting Jimmy O'Regan ([email protected]): > >> I doubt there'll be one; not from Debian itself, at least - the >> licence is, as you noted, Affero GPL, which Debian do not consider >> free (because the additional terms beyond those required by the >> 'regular' GPL fall into what Debian consider to be restrictions on the >> mere use of the software). > > Noted -- for ambiguous and rather doubtful values of "Debian".
But that's the only kind 
> That is, > no officer or ruling body of the Debian Project has ever so ruled, nor > have the ftp masters opined to that effect. What you (probably) really > mean is that some number of the subscribers to the unmoderated public > mailing list debian-legal, a mailing list that in no way speaks Debian's > institutional opinion and is also an absolute magnet for licensing > cranks, posted views to that effect. >
Of course, there has been the usual debian-legal whack-a-mole, but I'm almost sure I've seen evidence of deeper resistance to this kind of licence - the details escape me, but I'm not a morning person; perhaps I'll recall during the course of the day, as I gradually wake up.