Comment 450 for bug 269656

> It is certainly possible to have a free service. Look at the Affero
> General Public License. That deals with services. You could say that
> those are free services.

Errr... ?! The licence clearly says:

'Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
covered by this License,...' and

'...and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents
constitute a work based on the Program...'

And, as any other license, it's about software, not a service. You can
have GPL software on your computer, but your service, based on it, can
be non-free. Output of AGPL-ed software (aka service) can be non-free -
it's simple, AGPL doesn't cover services.

And, at last, how much are Affero's terms of use different that those
from Mozilla (except that are much, much bigger and difficult to read)?

http://www.affero.com/ctos.html

> The problem is that "free service" is not very much defined. What
> makes something a free service? Apparently, the AGPL does. But is
> that the only free "web services license"? Are Terms of Service
> allowed in a free service?

Free service doesn't have anything to do with free software. Those are
two totally different things.

> TCP, IP, FTP, SSL - these are all open standards. These are not
> "services" but rather communication protocols.
>
> None of those services require that you either assent to their terms,
> or else disable them. There are no "end user terms of use" for these
> protocols (AFAIK).

I wasn't talking about TCP. I said that TCP package you generate goes
from your computer and uses services of your ISP (like routing,
maybe NAT-ing, etc...) which are based on probably non-free hardware
and non-free hardware's operating system.

I don't see any difference between asking my ISP non-free router's
operating system where should my data go and asking
non-free Google/Mozilla if some website is 'phishing'. You can, as with
FTP, implement this on any project/browser
(http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/).

IMHO, definition of free service is very much like open
standard/protocol. If I can use some service and share data collected
using that service, without restrictions, that's an open service.
Having service served by open source software, but not having rights to
share collected data is obviously non-free service. But even that can't
always be true...

Note: I'll not respond to any responses cause this bug report isn't the
right place to have this type of conversation.