Software-as-a-service gets open source licence

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released a new licence for software-as-as-service (SaaS) application developers.

The new licence is based on the development work of a San Francisco-based volunteers rating and reputation company Affero, who created a licence based on the second version of the FSF's GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

It wrote the new licence to ensure any modifications made to open-source based SaaS applications will continue to be contributed to the free software community, saying on its website that it could not wait for the recently published third GNU GPL.

The GNU GPL is key to open source software, because its advocates maintain program source code should be freely available to study and modify, so that those programs released under the GNU GPL can be copied and redistributed. Developers can, however, modify source code without any obligation to share the changes if the software is only used for internal, company purposes alone.

But SaaS applications did not fall into this category until now, meaning that anyone distributing services that used modified code needn't necessarily distribute the changes necessary to make the service work.

But with the GNU GPLv3 being finalised in July earlier this year, this new SaaS licence has been based on the most recent, third version and is called the GNU Affero General Public Licence version 3 (GNU AGPLv3).

SaaS vendors argue that their hosted applications, which offer software functionality literally 'as a service,' are easier to use and deploy and cheaper to maintain. But only time will tell if this flavour of software develops an open source following.

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