Google Code Project Hosting relaxes license policy (opens in new tab)

He's right that is is deeply flawed. In no particular order:

1. It violates the FSF's "Free Software Definition". Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program for any purpose. They explain this as:

    The freedom to run the program means the freedom
    for any kind of person or organization to use it
    on any kind of computer system, for any kind of
    overall job and purpose, without being required to
    communicate about it with the developer or any
    other specific entity. In this freedom, it is
    the user's purpose that matters, not the
    developer's purpose; you as a user are free
    to run the program for your purposes, and if
    you distribute it to someone else, she is then
    free to run it for her purposes, but you are
    not entitled to impose your purposes on her.

If I, as a user, wish to run an AGPL program as a daemon on my system to generate forms that get presented to customers and that processes the input the customers type into the forms, I'm the user. AGPL requires that I communicate about the program with the customers. This violates Freedom 0.

2. It seems at odds with #10 of the OSI Open Source Definition ("No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface").

3. It prohibits something that is allowed by copyright law. Pretty much every other free/open license is based on granting permission for you to do things that would not be allowed under copyright law, without requiring you to give up any of your rights allowed by copyright as the owner of a particular copy lawfully made. To put it succinctly, AGPL is a EULA.

That the FSF accepted AGPL shows a major breakdown in their idealism.

AGPL does have some pretty deep flaws. See [0] for a description of some of the problems. I can't say I'd ever touch AGPL code with a 10 foot pole, simply because I've talked to lawyers about it and it's unbelievably messy (add to that the fact that a user of the AGPL is probably much more likely to sue you if you don't meet their expectations on the license.)

[0] http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=4297#c6

I'm not sure how that's relevant but as an aside qgyh2 was a project where a large number of users used the account to post (I haven't got a source and I know it sounds myth-y but it's what I've read).