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> Obligatory: I’m not a lawyer; this is for informational purposes only That's the main point, though. You aren't, in fact, a lawyer. And this is not, in fact
by knorker 6y ago
> Obligatory: I’m not a lawyer; this is for informational purposes only
That's the main point, though. You aren't, in fact, a lawyer. And this is not, in fact legal advice. You are presumably expert in a non-legal field, and you are giving expert opinion on something you are not an expert on.
The GPL is tested. The LGPL less so, but lawyers seem to be more comfortable with it.
There's the extra complexity that Google compiles its binaries statically.
You're calling Google liars. There's an alternative interpretation of events where a whole legal department, with great lawyers, and backed by great engineers to clarify the technical aspects for the lawyers, come to a different conclusion than yours.
And you just dismiss that as lies. I don't think that's fair at all. You wouldn't want a lawyer to come and say "bah, you should just make that inherently NP problem complete fast for all inputs. How hard could it be? If you say it's hard then you're lying.".
> this is for informational purposes only
This is pretty arrogant. "I'm not a lawyer, but here are the real legal facts to ACTUALLY educate you".
You should say it's "for speculation purposes only", or "for entertainment purposes only".
> Don’t be afraid to use the AGPL, and don’t be afraid to use software which uses the AGPL.
This is ignoring one big problem though. Agree or not, call them liars or not, but Google and it's employees will NOT touch your software. Not only will you not get Google as users (though if you dual-license yes in fact Google DOES buy software, if they can buy it as non-AGPL), you will not get Google employees as contributors.
- saagarjha 6y ago> You're calling Google liars. There's an alternative interpretation of events where a whole legal department, with great lawyers, and backed by great engineers to clarify the technical aspects for the lawyers, come to a different conclusion than yours. Google claims that they care about your privacy. Entire teams of engineers and lawyers will say the same thing. But when you look at it, you can plainly see that they are probably just saying that because their main business is collecting data about you. Similarly, Google runs many projects with a closed-source server-side component, and using the AGPL would not let them do that. Do you see why it is not surprising they would come to a different conclusion?
- knorker 6y agoSo your legal interpretation as a lawyer (I assume) is an ad hominem on Google for unrelated reasons?
- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoGoogle is not even a human to apply an ad hominem to, fanboy
- lmm 6y agoWhen you complain about someone calling Google liars, the fact that Google has a long history of flagrant lying is not an ad hominem but relevant background.
- knorker 6y agoBackground yes, argument no.
- rando832 6y agoAnd Microsoft said all GPL was a cancer and unamerican and viral and disallowed it from about 50k engineer's computers due to "legal risk of GPL virality", and this was when they were by far the biggest software company. Wait, they lied? It was all FUD and really about threatening their business model. They changed their policies and actually said publicly they were wrong. Is it so hard to believe?
- knorker 6y agoRight. So because MS used the wrong strategy that is evidence that Google's lawyers are deriving incorrect legal conclusions? Is that your argument? So because MS was wrong once, Google is wrong other times of your choosing?