Capital One — where Jagielski presently serves as a senior distinguished technical fellow — can safely adapt its corporate culture to be permissive about using and adapting open source software, without the fear of being charged with violating copyright with its adaptations.

Jagielski’s most eye-opening revelations about the changes that have already happened in open source licensing — in ways we may not have been aware of — involve the legal meaning of “distribution.”  In an earlier age, to use software, you had to copy it — and of course, that’s distribution.  Yet when server-based applications were first being subscribed to by users and utilized through browsers without copying, suddenly it wasn’t distribution any more.

“That’s one of the reasons why the Free Software Foundation created a special version of GPL, called the Affero GPL,” he explained, “specifically designed to handle those cases.  It basically says that redistribution of software — which is when these licenses kick in — even applies if you’re just using the software ‘as-a-Service.’”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WbgcIcNErKg