Unfortunately the #AGPL has new loopholes now.
My network #copyleft of choice, right now is the #HackingLicense: http://www.tesio.it/documents/HACK.txt
@Shamar @ekaitz_zarraga @Pixificial @craigmaloney Do you have a source explaining what those loopholes are, by chance. Would love to read up on them.
There are several and I should definitely find the time to write something about them (and maybe debate with #RMS about them).
One evident and recent one has been shown by the #GitHub #Copilot affaire: code is data too, but the #GPL does not require sharing the output of such kind of compilation.
But there are many other ways that the knowledge contained in or derived by #AGPL software can be privatized.
Indeed AGPL does not prevent embrace, extend, extinguish tactics.
It may well keep in the commons the derivative works of a specific software but does not affect any software built on top of it, in particular if its services are provided through standard protocols.
Also the Oracle vs Google has shown that any innovative API gifted to commons by #FreeSoftware hackers would be taken by #BigTech corporations and turned into exploitation tool: if it happened to Oracle's Java API, it will happen to any Free Software that affect the interests of people running such corporations.
Not to mention complexity! Or patents!
The #HackingLicense address all of this.
In includes a copyright and patent assignment TO THE USER, both conditioned to the preservation in the commons of both derivative works AND works dependent on it.
It's not a #copyleft designed to protect priviledge but to build a free cultural corpus of commons that belong to the whole humanity and cannot be turned into exploitation of free labor.
@aral @ekaitz_zarraga @Pixificial @craigmaloney
Little follow up about the #HackingLicense.
It has been adoped by #MonitoraPA, an automatic and distributed observatory written in #Python with the explicit goal to be easy to hack and run for any teenager who just learnt the language from an online tutorial.
On our first run we detected 7833 public administrations' websites using #GoogleAnalytics.
We formally requested all of their DPO and Data Controller to remove it as its usage is in violation of #GDPR as established by the #Schrems2 sentence of @Curia (thanks to @noybeu).
Two weeks later, almost 4000 italian public administrations (several hundreds of schools!) that were sending to #Google detailed data about every page visit, removed Google Analytics.
More details about the project are available (in Italian) at https://monitora-pa.it
Next week we will officially run our observatory again, we will notify again PA that still have Google Analytics in violation of #GDPR, but we will also escalate to the various Authorities that Italian and European Law provide.
And obviously, Google Analytics is just a starting point!
We are refactoring our code to make it trivial to add more conformity checks even beyond the web and to run it over different data sources so that people can easily run our observatory over any set of websites, from political parties to football clubs.
And in the July's run, we hope to detect and request removal for at least #GoogleFont connections and #Facebook Tracking Pixels too.
Obviously we got several powerful enemies. #Google for first, but also several Italian lawyers and administrators that did not protected citizens personal data.
And among them, quite expected, compromised organizations like #OSI that are spreading #FUD about our license of choice without even reading it or trying to help us to improve it.
https://github.com/hermescenter/monitorapa/issues/39#issuecomment-1140274175
