Back in 2006, Tim O'Reilly announced that "Open source licenses are obsolete." His point was that Web 2.0 applications and software as a service models don't distribute software so they don't trigger the distribution clause.  No longer. The Affero General Public License plugs that hole and makes open source licensing relevant again in the Web 2.0 world.  Affero's copyleft provision applies to software as a service applications. That's why we picked Affero for our OSSDiscovery project.

Affero (or AGPL) was written last November by the FSF but was approved last week by the OSI. In the past week there have been a lot of blog posts written on it.

• Mark Radcliffe and Fabrizio Capiobianco have a friendly bet going on whether GPLv3 or AGPL is going to be more popular. I think the answer should depend on what people are trying to accomplish with their open source software. We've found that the Apache license is the license most commonly found in enterprises. I don't think that's by coincidence but it doesn't make the Apache license better than the GPL – it just means they server different purposes. 
• Fabrizio and Chris DiBono are going back and forth on whether Google is abusing open source by using GPL software in the software as a service model. Chris, instead of simply stating that Google is using open software and respecting all of the licensing terms (and pointing to Google's open source contributions), attacked the Affero license which then gave Dana Blankenhorn things to write about.

So I'm not sure I had a lot new to contribute to the Affero vs GPL blogosphere debate but I did want to add my thanks to Funabol for getting OSI approval for Affero. (I find it strange that the FSF writes license but then leaves getting OSI approval to end users.)