GNU Affero General Public License

History

In 2000, while developing an e-learning and e-service business model at Mandriva, Henry Poole met with Richard Stallman in Amsterdam and discussed the issue of the GPLv2 license not requiring Web application providers to share source code with the users interacting with their software over a network. Over the following months, Stallman and Poole discussed approaches to solve the problem. In 2001, Poole founded Affero Inc. (a web services business), and he needed a license that would require distribution by other organizations who used Affero code to create derivative web services. At that time, Poole contacted Bradley M. Kuhn and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation to get advice on a new license that would resolve this matter in GPLv2.

Around late February 2002, Kuhn suggested, based on the idea of a quine (a program that prints its own source code), that GPLv2 be supplemented with a section 2(d) that would require derivative works to maintain a "download source" feature that would provide complete and corresponding source code. Kuhn argued that there was precedent for such a requirement in GPLv2 section 2(c), which required preserving certain features by downstream distributors and modifiers.{{cite web | access-date = June 14, 2008 | author-link = Bradley M. Kuhn | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20080315231323/http://www.softwarefreedom.org/technology/blog/2007/nov/21/stet-and-agplv3/ | archive-date = March 15, 2008 | url-status = dead

Moglen and Kuhn wrote the text of the proposed new section 2(d), and provided it to Poole, who then requested and received permission from the FSF to publish a derivative of GPLv2 for this purpose. In March 2002, Affero, Inc. published the original Affero General Public License (AGPLv1) for use with the Affero project and made the new license available for use by other software-as-a-service developers.{{cite web | access-date=2021-01-03}}

The FSF contemplated including the special provision of AGPLv1 into GPLv3 but ultimately decided to publish a separate license, nearly identical to GPLv3 but containing a provision similar in purpose and effect to section 2(d) of AGPLv1. The new license was named the GNU Affero General Public License. Retaining the Affero name indicated its close historic relationship with AGPLv1. The GNU AGPL was given version number 3 for parity with the GPL, and the current GNU Affero General Public License is often abbreviated AGPLv3.

The finalized version of GNU AGPLv3{{cite web | access-date = November 19, 2007 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20071204202305/https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html | archive-date = 2007-12-04 | url-status = live

Compatibility with the GPL

Both versions of the AGPL, like the corresponding versions of the GNU GPL on which they are based, are strong copyleft licenses. In the Free Software Foundation's judgment, the added requirement in section 2(d) of Affero GPL v1 made it incompatible with the otherwise nearly identical GPLv2. That is to say, one cannot distribute a single work formed by combining components covered by each license.

By contrast, the GPLv3 and GNU AGPLv3 licenses include clauses (in section 13 of each license) that together achieve a form of mutual compatibility for the two licenses. These clauses explicitly allow the "conveying" of a work formed by linking code licensed under the one license against code licensed under the other license,{{Cite web | access-date=2021-01-03}} despite the licenses otherwise not allowing relicensing under the terms of each other.{{Cite web | access-date=2021-01-03}} In this way, the copyleft of each license is relaxed to allow distributing such combinations.

To establish an upgrade path from Affero's original AGPLv1 to the GNU AGPLv3, Affero, Inc. published the Affero General Public License version 2 in November 2007,{{cite web | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191123102313/http://www.affero.org/agpl2.html | archive-date=2019-11-23 | url-status=unfit | access-date=2021-01-03}} which is merely a transitional license that allows recipients of software licensed under "AGPLv1 or any later version as published by Affero, Inc." to distribute the software, or derivative works, under the GNU AGPLv3 or any later version.

Examples of applications under GNU AGPL

Main article: List of software under the GNU AGPL

Flask developer Armin Ronacher noted in 2013 that the GNU AGPL is a "terrible success, especially among the startup community" as a "vehicle for dual commercial licensing", and gave HumHub, MongoDB (that later relicensed, see below), Odoo (that later switched to the LGPL), RethinkDB (that later relicensed to permissive license), Shinken, Slic3r, SugarCRM, and WURFL as examples.

MongoDB dropped the AGPL in late-2018 in favor of the "Server Side Public License" (SSPL), a modified version which requires those who offer the licensed software as a service accessible to third-parties, to make the entire source code of all software used to facilitate the service (including without limitation all "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available") available under the same license. As approval for the SSPL by the Open Source Initiative was not forthcoming, the application for certification was withdrawn. It was banned by both Debian and the Fedora Project, who state that the license's intent is to discriminate against cloud computing providers offering services based on the software without purchasing its commercial license.

Software continues to be released under AGPLv3, various examples include many servers and clients for the fediverse such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube, office suite software OnlyOffice, the RStudio IDE for the R programming language, system monitoring platform Grafana, the document/bibliography management system Zotero and more.

Decentralized chat and collaboration software Element was relicensed from Apache 2.0 to both AGPLv3 and GPLv3, with a separate proprietary license for Element Commercial.

References

References

1. "GNU AGPLv3". GNU Project.
2. Jaspert, Joerg. (November 28, 2008). "ftp.debian.org: Is AGPLv3 DFSG-free?". The Debian Project.
3. "Licenses". TL;DR legal.
4. "Why the Affero GPL".
5. "OSI approved licenses". Open Source initiative.
6. (Mar 13, 2008). "Funambol Helps New AGPLv3 Open Source License Gain Formal OSI Approval". Funambol.
7. "Affero GPLv3: Why It Exists & Who It's For?".
8. "SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL [LWN.net]".
9. Ronacher, Armin. (2013-07-23). "Licensing in a Post Copyright World". lucumr.pocoo.org.
10. "Server Side Public License (SSPL)".
11. Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J.. "MongoDB "open-source" Server Side Public License rejected".
12. (2019-01-16). "MongoDB's licensing changes led Red Hat to drop the database from the latest version of its server OS".
13. "Element Copyright License - AGPL 3.0".
14. "Element Copyright License - GPL 3.0".
15. "Element Copyright License - Commercial License".