CSI open source's the TriSano public health application under AGPLv3
The GNU General Public License (GPL), unlike Apache-style licensing, offers perhaps the best way to prevent a community from forking. It's therefore not surprising to see the Collaborative Software Initiative turning to the Affero GPL Version 3 to help foster and protect its budding TriSano community.
Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center and co-author of the AGPLv3, agrees:
By offering the code under the widely used AGPLv3 license, Collaborative Software Initiative gives the user community the assurance of knowing that the code can be modified, customized, and shared in a low-friction way to suit their very specific project requirements. AGPLv3 was written as a roadmap to foster the most open, transparent and collaborative open source and free software communities possible.
"Open" is in the eyes of the beholder--there is a longstanding debate between the GPL and BSD/Apache communities as to which is more open--but there's little debate that GPL offers a more robust way to provide incentives against forking a project. TriSano will be better for having all participants rowing in the same direction. AGPLv3 gives them this.
One question, though: why AGPLv3 instead of simply GPLv3? Is there an element of Web-based distribution here against which CSI is hoping to guard?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Every project is different and we determined that of the OSI approved licenses, AGPL was the right fit for TriSano.
And I agree that "open" is in the eyes of the beholder. One size does not fit all.
TriSano is a citizen-focused surveillance system for infectious disease management. It is being expanded to cover environmental hazards, bioterrorism, and outbreak management.
The AGPL is what was intended with the original GPL before SaaS was envisioned. It simply requires everyone deriving value from it to give back their changes. It should be noted that TriSano is highly configurable so not every deployment will be making changes to the code.
Over the next few years, we expect to see substantial adoption of TriSano worldwide. The feature set in TriSano and on its roadmap makes it a core public health application. TriSano isn't an integration library or something that will be embedded into larger applications. Its a corner stone. We believe that the public health is best served by ensuring that future improvements to TriSano by Collaborative Software Initiative and other members of the TriSano community will be made available to all so that everyone can benefit from them. The AGPL is the best license to ensure this in our view.
The problem that TriSano is focused on solving can benefit greatly from a common code base. Data standards are certainly a large part of the interop solution, but tighter interop is simpler and more achievable when various instances of surveillance / outbreak management systems are running the same code base. Good examples of this are neighboring states or Indian Reservations in the case of a cluster or an outbreak. Diseases & environmental hazards know no boundaries, but the current crop of public health systems certainly do.
Lastly, we do offer SaaS options for TriSano so the AGPL not only protects Collaborative Software Initiative from other TriSano SaaS providers (certainly not discouraged), but in protects the entire community - it levels the playing field and makes us all do the right thing by keeping the code wide open.
Mike
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Mike Herrick
TriSano Program Manager, Collaborative Software Initiative