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Freeside Internet Services: Doing Well With Purely Free Software (Video)
While attending ITEXPO West in Austin, TX, Slashdot editor Timothy Lord met Ivan Kohler, the "President, Founder and Head Geek" of a company called Freeside Internet Services that is 100% open source (no dual-licensing) and makes its living supporting software Ivan says is used to manage some of the very unsexy backend tasks that ISPs and VoIP providers need to do, like track usage and send bills to customers. Freeside uses the AGPL license, which Ivan calls "a GPL variant for web applications" that, he says, "prevents people from taking our software, modifying it, and selling it in a hosted capacity as proprietary software."
Jesus, /., you're not even pretending anymore. Suck a little harder, I don't think you've quite earned your paycheck for this particular slashvertisement.
Freeside is only free if your time is not. Having looked into it in a previous life the interface, coding and feature set of freeside are all terrible.
Open source is a positive thing but it does not automatically mean all open source projects are worth using.
Where's the mug of frosty piss guy when you actually _need_ him?
I think we all know what the AGPL is.
And if you're worried we might not, you could give a link (like I just did, or this), instead of some random person's summary.
then I could wipe my smelly Irish ass with it.
Damn... I tought that one was about an orbiting balneary station/criminal paradise
The great thing about the GPL, from an enforcability perspective, is that violating it is an automatic copyright violation under default (i.e. "all rights reserved") law, so it really doesn't matter if one agrees to it or not; agreeing to it is the only way to have any redistribution permission at all.
The AGPL, on the other hand, tries to restrict use where there is no copyright-violation because there is no distribution of source or binary. This sort of restriction is valid only if agreed to in a contract. Serious commercial software (CAD and such) requires you to sign a contract of some sort to receive the software, which is pretty rock-solid. With EULAs, at least there's clicking an "OK, I agree" button, which may be considered to create a legally binding contract, though in many jurisdictions this is not valid. With the AGPL, there's NO ACTION OF AGREEING AT ALL -- good luck ever enforcing it in court. They will say they never agreed to the AGPL's terms, and they'll get away with it.
TFS mentions that Freeside makes their money on support. Here's the caveat - you need it.
I spent a full work week, with the assitance of several high level (in charge of thousands of servers, been doing it for 10+ years) admins and perl programmers (Freeside's native tounge) attempting to install it. To put it shortly, the documentation is terrible. I discovered over seventy undocumented modules, not including those modules required modules, that were required simply to even install the thing. We spoke to one of the developers on the project who basically told us this difficulty was intended and let us know he'd be extremely impressed if we got it installed without his help.
So yea, it's free... If you don't mind either paying them to install it or spending an inordinate amount of time installing and configuring it.
Joy! Beautiful spark of the gods!
This is an actual factual example of how the Affero GPL IS DAMN USEFUL for GPL'd code.
which don't use the PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT Goodbye...she had were c0mpounded least of which is UNITED STATES. And other party that supports
Seriously. To anyone using a title that stupid: fuck you and your company.
on to their systems.
That's a copyright violation right there.
I actually had Ivan install Freeside and train the staff when I was still running a dialup ISP. The software is a bear to install, but mainly because it is so massive a piece of software. At the end of the day, Freeside saved us a ton of man hours by automating most of the administrative tasks like account suspension and billing. Since I used it last Freeside has gotten loads of new functionality. It was well worth the initial cost of having Ivan come out and install, transfer our old accounting info, and train the staff.
No I don't work for Freeside or Slashdot.
Of the worlds financial issues. Stop putting out free software, it kills global economies. Suck it up and PAY for software...
TodAy. It's 4bout
It stops someone owning the server that has the code running on it from not allowing you, the user running the code on their server, from refusing to supply you the source code for the software you are using running on their server.
So when someone wants to take Freeside's code, THAT company (hereafter called THEY) must obey the AGPL.
Since the code has to get on THEIR server, they cannot copy the code on to THEIR server without giving YOU the same rights as THEY got from Freeside. Including if that person works for Freeside or is asked by Freeside to get the code.
The AGPL is one of the most restrictive and dangerous licenses out there. it gives the ither party an implicit right to audit your code base. The AGPL is an example of purity vs relevance. all the interesting work these days is being done on bsd/apache/mit licensed code.
all the requirements up front and delayed the install several times.
I use this system at my WISP called BillMax. I didn't pick it, but I put up with it for a while. It uses fairly generic MySQL and Apache, and you get most of the source when you license it. They seem to think the only OS in the world is RHEL, though. Recently though, they've switched to a leased licensing scheme, take a lot of our money, and don't do very much for it. If I'm going to recommend giving someone a heap of dollars for making this work, I'd rather it be a real Open Source project and one that presents less restrictions on where I install it.
Has anyone used both and can comment?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your description is both disturbing and very strange. I happen to have a need for this type of software and went to their website after seeing the article (didn't read, this is Slashdot). I see a VMWare appliance offered for download. Does this appliance not work? Is it incomplete?