Re: non-SMTP uses (was: Thoughts on MixMinion archives)

[Len Sassaman <rabbi@quickie.net>]

On 23 Apr 2002, Nick Mathewson wrote:

> [Sent to you, personally, in case you'd rather not go into detail.
> Licensing discussions can get religious.  But feel free to reply to the
> list.]

Thanks.

> Hi, Len.
>
> I can still be talked out of the GPL, or out of the AGPL into the GPL,
> if you think they would serve some social good.

I do. It has been my experience that the open source movement has
historically been quite bad at producing GUI client apps with a good UI.
It generally takes some sort of commercial or financial interest for this
to occur, and the GPL often makes that a non-starter.

> What I'm really looking for is: a scenario in which it would serve some
> social good (or some other desirable function) for Alice to be able to
> modify the _server_ codebase in a way that the GPL would prohibit.

I can think of a lot of ways that Alice could modify the server codebase
to harm society, but all of these assume Alice is evil (in which case, the
last thing she's going to care about is your steenkin' license).

Imagine this: <insert the name of your favorite anonymity service provider
here> decides to set up some remailers, and solves the problem of how to
process anonymous messages and get paid for it by credit card. They want
to keep those changes to themselves, obviously, so that they can have an
advantage over other companies who may wish to do the same thing.

They would have an incentive to commit back to the community changes and
improvements they make to the code in other ways, since it would be easier
for them to keep their proprietary branch of the code in sync with the
official one if they had as few proprietary patches as possible to worry
about.

[...]

This is how truly free software works, in my opinion.

> [Keep in mind that I'm not proposing that the client code be GPL'd or
> even LGPL'd.  Alice could still write code to send and receive messages
> under any license she preferred.]

Understood.

--Len.