Jeremy Allison of Samba Endorses AGPL

There is some debate on whether my comment during Jeremy Allison’s keynote at LibrePlanet 2009 was a heckle or not. (I did directly give Jeremy permission to call it such, so I don’t mind it. . However, there is no debate that Jeremy’s follow-up article clearly endorses the AGPL for Cloud Computing applications. In it, he says:

[I]f I ever work on cloud computing code, I’d like to see it under the AGPL, in order to preserve the freedoms I’ve been able to enjoy in conventional software development these many years. Without the AGPL, our freedoms will depend on the kindness of strangers donating their modifications to our code back to us, as they did in the days before the GPL license and the FSF was born.

This is great to see and I thank Jeremy for a great and open-minded response to my point (er, heckle .