[OpenWireless Tech] ANYFI IS PROPRIETARY!

[Björn Smedman]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 7:24 PM,
<michi1 at michaelblizek.twilightparadox.com> wrote:
> On 21:10 Mon 12 Aug     , Björn Smedman wrote:
> ...
>> This "WPA over the wire" approach is a technically ambitious. But
>> we've already gone through the trouble of implementing it (see
>> http://anyfi.net) and would love to share with the community. Also the

When I say we'd love to share our implementation with the community,
that's me expressing a willingness to change the license. But exactly
what that new license should be is not an entirely straightforward
question (see below)...

>> modern Linux Wi-Fi stack (mac80211) lends itself quite nicely to it;
>> you can do it from user space with existing interfaces.
>
> I just saw that anyfi is proprietary:
> http://anyfi.net/download/LICENSE
>
> I am pretty annoyed that I have found this deeply hidden on your site after
> wasting my time looking at your project. Thank you for your respect to the
> free and open source software community which enables you to build things
> like this!

I'm sorry you feel that way. But I assure you we go through no trouble
to hide the license, linking to it both from the integration [1] and
the faq [2] page.

If you read the license you'll also see it's not your typical
proprietary license: The software is publicly available in binary
form, built for mips, arm and x86, linked against pretty much any libc
you can find, and you can download, integrate and redistribute it
without paying us a dime.

But you may also notice some limitations of the license: You're not
allowed to modify the software, and you're not allowed to interfere
with it's communication with servers or peers in a way that impairs
it.

Why have we licensed the software under those terms? Because the most
significant contribution to a project of this kind is not patches, but
radios. If we were to release the software say under the GPL it would
immediately be crippled, because much of the world operates on the
assumption that it's in your best interest to restrict access to
whatever radios you have.

Or to paraphrase rms: Other licenses, including the GPL, inadvertently
take away your mobility. By contrast, the Anyfi.net Standard Software
License is intended to protect your mobility -- ensuring that you can
connect to your favorite Wi-Fi networks whenever you come close to any
access point running Anyfi.net software.

I'm not saying there are no holes in that altruistic facade. We are a
VC funded startup and we are out to make money (and we do license the
software under other terms e.g. to ISPs). But there are plenty of
startups that have made significant contributions to open source, and
I think the community has a lot to gain by welcoming them. Or phrased
slightly differently: I'm not sure the problem here is too many
super-competent well-funded development teams offering their services
free of charge.

Cheers,

Björn

1. http://anyfi.net/integration

2. http://anyfi.net/faq