New cloud apps drive popularity of the AGPL license

This modifications thing, which with the naked eye pass sounds innocuous, is, as a matter of fact, a big deal for innovation companies that distribute software. Modification includes combining software with your own work. So, an ISV or embedded systems company may have a big fat proprietary software application with a tiny bit of GPL in it, and be compelled to license application pursuant to this agreement the GPL, thereby requiring them to make their all the source code available to anyone using software. That explains it, to sum up, even product companies that are keen contribute to the community are wary of their developers using GPL code.

The AGPL requires a broader spectrum of companies to contribute, by addressing an opening that the distribution requirement has left for SaaS companies. An ISV that uses a SaaS model, in this way avoiding the "d" word, can freely combine their proprietary code with GPL code and have no obligation to make their source code available. Google is a huge user of open source software including GPL, now they get to keep the secret search sauce secret. If they were using AGPL code, still, this would not be the case. AGPL says you have to make source code for a program available to anyone "interacting with it remotely through a computer network."

The same type

Sounds of the same type was written with Google in mind, no? Then, perhaps, now it was to tell the truth developed by a company, Affero, which had a network application and wanted to share during ensuring the propagation of its software. Affero means "contribute" in Latin. The company by that name had the mission of "bring(ing) a culture of patronage to the Internet." Their idea was modeled afterwards the way a street musician or artist is compensated. Their software allowed authors to put their stuff out on the web and, in essence, stick out a hat. They wanted to share their software, yet also wanted to ensure that users would contribute to it, in short worked with the Free Software Foundation to create the new license that bears their name.

Phil Odence Vice President of Business Development for Black Duck Software, makers of enterprise app development tools that address management, compliance and security challenges associated with open source. In that role Phil is responsible for expanding Black Duck's reach, image and product breadth by developing partnerships in the multi-source development ecosystem. He came to Black Duck from Empirix a leader in carrier VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), contact center and Web application testing and monitoring. He served there as Vice President of Business Development successfully developing the firm's alliance program, creating strategic partnerships, starting up new businesses and supporting M&A activities. Prior to Empirix, Phil was a partner at High Performance Systems, a computer simulation modeling firm where he was responsible for consulting and partnerships with leading management consultancies, including McKinsey and A.T. Kearney.

Black Duck counts a long list of so then-known innovation companies as partners. These include IBM, Novell, Red Hat, HP, Intel and Microsoft.