Software Freedom Law Center

December 1, 2008 by Bradley M. Kuhn

AGPL Declared DFSG-Free

Late last week, the FTP Masters of Debian — who, absent a vote of the Debian developers, make all licensing decisions — posted their ruling that AGPLv3 is DFSG-Free. I was glad to see this issue was finally resolved after months of confusion; the AGPLv3 is now approved by all known FLOSS licensing ruling bodies (FSF, OSI, and Debian).

It was somewhat fitting that the AGPLv3 was approved by Debian within a week of the one year anniversary of AGPLv3's release. This year of AGPLv3 has shown very rapid adoption of the AGPL. Even conservative numbers show an adoption rate of 15 projects per month. I expect the numbers to continue a steady, linear climb as developers begin to realize that the AGPL is the “copyleft of the Cloud”.

Posted by Bradley M. Kuhn on December 1, 2008. Please email any comments on this entry to <bkuhn@softwarefreedom.org>.

Tags: agplv3, debian

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