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AOLServer Open Sourced

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the yet-more-to-download dept.

Quite a number of people have written in with the news that AOLServer has been open-sourced under a GPLish looking license. You can grab the source or the documentation.

7 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Dammit... by Millennium · · Score: 3

    I always forget that it's a web server, not their own content server. I get my hopes up that AOL's gone Open-Source, and then it's a big letdown.

    Then again, AOL can't Open-Source its stuff; if it did it would die withim days. No, this is not anti-Open-Source FUD: let me explain. You see, most (if not all) of AOL's security features are implemented solely in the client. This means that if you figure out how to access AOL via a terminal (it IS possible, but exceedingly difficult; I've never managed it myself) you essentially have admin access, minus the pretty icons and such, no matter what screen name you use. You still can't get other people's passwords, but who cares; other than that it's more or less like having root access to AOL (if such a thing existed).

    In other words, if you Open-Source the client, it's a trivial matter to remove all of the readblocks in the client, recompile, and have an "instant admin" client. And you know all of the AOL lamers would have a field day with that.

    The Mac (or former Mac users) here who used to be on AOL might remember a program called AOL4Free (made by a guy calling himself Happy Hardcore). This nifty little hack undid one of these locks in the client... the one which told the AOL server to bill the user (this was back in the days before AOL went flat-rate). The way it did this, however, tended to overload the server with a certain kind of packet. When the program got popular, the server eventually ground to a chronic halt; although AOL doesn't like people to know about it this was the real reason AOL was so slow until their server upgrade of a few years back; Mac users were getting free time and flooding the server as a side effect (I don't think a Windoze equivalent was ever made).

    The program eventually started undoing other locks, allowing the user access to admin-only areas (such as the fabled "Center of the Earth" chatroom, which at the time had double the capacity of normal chatrooms). The guides eventually had to move out of that chatroom, and went to one called "Wonderland"; Hardcore cracked that one too, and I don't even know where the guides hang out now.

    So you see, in AOL's case, Open-Sourcing the client really does mean death. But they have only themselves to blame for not designing their software right in the first place.

  2. It's Open Source by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3
    The program is dual-licensed with the GPL and a NPL variant. The GPL is, of course, already accepted as an Open Source license. The NPL variant is probably Open Source too, but I haven't done a detailed audit and thus can't say for sure.

    This is the same AOL that some unauthorized character at Sun told us was thinking of giving up the Mozilla license. We already knew that report was bogus, but this is just more evidence.

    Thanks

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  3. new license review by Palisade · · Score: 4

    I've looked over the code with my legal eye and see a few imperfections. It seems like AOL is trying very hard to understand, and in my opinion they're doing very well. I congratulate them on this license, yet I think by version 1.2 they could fix a few of the obvious problems very easily.

    My disection follows:

    AOL is using the Mozilla license with some amendments following, having never read the Mozilla license before I did notice some problems with it itself. I knew the MPL wasn't completely perfect, but it is a very well written license that closely follows what I consider a good open source/free software license standard.

    Enough with the psychobabble, and onto the legalbabble.

    Everything looked okay until I arrived at Section 2.2 Contributer Grant. Section 2.2.a gives the contributer exactly the same rights the "Initial Developer" (in this case, AOL) has. However, Section 2.2.c denies these rights and makes both Section 2.2.a and 2.2.b invalid if the contributer does not use the "Covered Code" (all code including original code and modified code) commercially. It is quite obvious that hobby programmers will be screwed legally, having inherited absolutely no rights whatsoever in the agreeing to this license. This also means a hobbyist developer isn't allowed to modify or redistribute the code.

    Section 3.1 denies the contributer the right to sub-license the code. (Does this mean AOL isn't allowed to make amendments? No. Section 6.3 claims you can create your own license using the MPL but you must show significant differences and use a name not related to Mozilla or Netscape in any way. Would having left sections 6.1 - 6.3 unmodified be deemed inproper modification? These sections contain sentances stating the license is controlled by Netscape/Mozilla and related to them, otherwise they are important parts of the license and should stay the way they are.)

    The rest of the MPL seemed ok, now onto AOL's amendments:

    Amendment IV basically says AOL has the right to add proprietary code to the AOL/MPL'ed code.

    Amendment V is intentionally omitted?!?!?!?

    Exhibit A which is an external part of the license implies that the provisions of the AOL/MPL license can be swapped with the provisions of the GPL license... Anyone confused yet? ;-)

    Sincerely,
    Nelson Rush

    --
    "God prevent we should ever be twenty years without a revolution." -- Thomas Jefferson
  4. Cool!! It works. by Beethoven · · Score: 4

    I built it on Debian and it works!

    If AOLServer is half as good as Greenspun says, it will be serious competition indeed for Apache. With its GPL, people can rip out chunks of Apache wholesale and stick them in aolserver. A mod_perl interface would be my first suggestion.

  5. Details: by phazer · · Score: 3

    More info about the AOLserver can be found at http://www.aolserver.com/

    -phazer

  6. First Multithreaded, DB-backed, PUBLISHING SYSTEM by just+someone · · Score: 3

    Dynamic Page scripting (using a tested language, TCL), Autoindexing, Archiving, with a c-API.

    Oh, yea, and the first to use HTTP PUT to create web pages. Using version 2 of AOLpress, the publishing of material to the server was/is transparent. A web server was treated just like a local directory.

    Best designed server/web publishing system. It just lost out to money, and bigger development budgets (and a slow browser/publisher). Most of the admin interface was done in TCl, so you could modify it.

  7. Version 2.3 rules by microbob · · Score: 3

    We really like the 2.3 version, nice fast multi-threaded server. Web based admin (nuked in 3.0) was really slick, very configurable server.

    We serve over 1.5M hits per day with ease, never taking more than 8% CPU or more than 12M of RAM. Sometimes we'll take 25-35 hits per sec....

    Unfortunately no mod_perl/velocigen backend, seems to lean towards TCL.

    Jim