here is snipit from my thesis about the metavid code licence. The full paper will be available in a open contestble format shortly I belive aphids version will be as well

Licensing the metavid code base was an important element of the praxis of open source. Several licenses were considered to secure the freedom of participants to re-negotiate the mediations enabled by the metavid software. This survey and license selection process addressed the problems of contemporary archival systems, through the practice of open source licensing.

BSD styled licenses are generally considered the most liberal licenses and are comparable to releasing code under the public domain. The metavid code base under a BSD license would mirror the public domain qualities of the media assets that make up the metavid archive. But a BSD style license was not selected because metavid participants did not want mediations based on the metavid codebase to become closed source and lose the qualities that open source praxis promoted. Under a BSD style licensee future version of the software could be closed source and make mediation opaque, un-contestable and privately owned. This would limit the possibility for creative reconstructions, limit transparency and make the archives construction less contestable. The GPL or general public licensee was considered a good fit as it would preserve access to the source code for derivate work.

As Metavid begin to closely investigate the GPL in the context of online services it was discovered that network services were not considered as a form of software distribution. Since it was important that all participants in metavid have access to the source code regardless of wheatear the software was installed locally or ran over a network, we chose the aGPL (the affero general public license). This little known license is nearly identical to the GPL with the exception of online usage of aGPL code must include a link to the source. This address the issues of web services getting around the distribution of the alterations to the code base that they have made, by declaring “any user interacting with the Program [is] given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program’s complete source code”. (agpl sec 2d)