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Non-interactive Program with Affero clause

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Revision as of 04:54, 31 March 2006; view current revision
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Simple scenario.

Suppose there's some program licensed with an Affero clause such as mentioned in (7d).

Suppose I then create a derivative work of it which is *not* an interactive program; in fact, it's a completely non-interactive program with specified output; a 'grep' or 'sed' workalike, perhaps. But there was some large chunk of code from the Affero-licensed application which I found useful for this program.

I'm screwed. There's no way to provide the feature required by the Affero clause without breaking my program's interface.

This indicates that the Affero clauses allowed by (7d) are in fact non-free. They should be rewritten as a requirement applying to a human (the person making the program available), not a restriction on the technical details of the program being written. As a human, I could easily satisfy the requirement to provide source to all the users of my program; but my program cannot and must not satisfy that requirement.

(Incidentally, I dual-license this text under the GPL (any version), because the current version of the GFDL has serious design flaws. All edits to this page assumed to be licensed similarly.)