AOLServer Open Sourced

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.

Comments

new license review

[Palisade]

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

Cool!! It works.

[Beethoven]

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.