- To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you
-these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have
-certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if
-you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.
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- For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
-gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same
-freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive
-or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they
-know their rights.
-
- Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps:
-(1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License
-giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.
-
- For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains
-that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users' and
-authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as
-changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to
-authors of previous versions.
-
- Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run
-modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer
-can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of
-protecting users' freedom to change the software. The systematic
-pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to
-use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we
-have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those
-products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we
-stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions
-of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users.
-
- Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents.
-States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of
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-avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could
-make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that
-patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.
+ Developers that use our General Public Licenses protect your rights
+with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer
+you this License which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute
+and/or modify the software.
+
+ A secondary benefit of defending all users' freedom is that
+improvements made in alternate versions of the program, if they
+receive widespread use, become available for other developers to
+incorporate. Many developers of free software are heartened and
+encouraged by the resulting cooperation. However, in the case of
+software used on network servers, this result may fail to come about.
+The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and
+letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its
+source code to the public.
+
+ The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to
+ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available
+to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to
+provide the source code of the modified version running there to the
+users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on
+a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source
+code of the modified version.
+
+ An older license, called the Affero General Public License and
+published by Affero, was designed to accomplish similar goals. This is
+a different license, not a version of the Affero GPL, but Affero has
+released a new version of the Affero GPL which permits relicensing under
+this license.
projects / ldid.git / blobdiff