> Not true. Copyright includes the right to control how a work
> may be performed publicly. I presume this allows the AGPL to
> enter a "You may only make this work available publically if
> you do X, Y and Z."
The thing is that if the work isn't being made available, then copyright just doesn't apply. Public performance applies to things like art and music, for which the work must be duplicated to be performed. But software does not have to be duplicated (excepting from disk->ram, etc, which is considered fair use).
For example, if there was an AGPL'd binary which would render a PDF to a PNG, I could host it on my server and let people interact with it but not release the source. The reason I do not have to release the source is that I am not distributing the binary.
The AGPL is designed for cases where interaction requires that part of the work itself be sent to the user -- examples are web pages, Java applets, and so on.
if there was an AGPL'd binary which would render a PDF to a PNG, I could host it on my server and let people interact with it but not release the source. The reason I do not have to release the source is that I am not distributing the binary.
These seems exactly like the use case of the AGPL, which I why I think they would have covered that.
(Web Pages (of a web application) are the rendered output of programmes on the server side, so would be the same as "a binary that made a PDF into a PNG")
Web pages aren't just rendered output, they also (usually) include portions of the web app in them (javascript, template sections, images, etc). This means that the output is itself a derived work of the original code, and thus needs copyright permission to distribute.
For example, if there was an AGPL'd binary which would render a PDF to a PNG, I could host it on my server and let people interact with it but not release the source. The reason I do not have to release the source is that I am not distributing the binary.
The AGPL is designed for cases where interaction requires that part of the work itself be sent to the user -- examples are web pages, Java applets, and so on.