8 ms·

>The lawyers can still play their games in court, it's free software either way. That isn't true at all. If someone takes GCC, makes some changes and re-releas

>The lawyers can still play their games in court, it's free software either way. That isn't true at all. If someone takes GCC, makes some changes and re-releases GCCv2 as closed source, there's no open source boogeyman that will force GCCv2 developers to release their code. It's up to courts, and by extension lawyers. Free software implicitly depends on lawyers to hold up the contract of Free Software. If lawyers tell you "this contract is unusable because of this clause" then you don't have free software, you have a weird proprietary license. The entire point of free software licenses is to define rules for lawyers to play "their games in court". It's worthless otherwise.

falcolas 6y ago
IMO, the fact that lawyers can't even agree on the scope of the AGPL means that semantics are just that, semantics. Many licenses haven't been tried in court, including the AGPL, yet it's used fairly broadly.
- javagram 6y ago
  AGPL is widely avoided by corporations precisely because of this problem... Corporations vastly prefer BSD/MIT style licenses or at most GPLv2. GPLv3 is avoided, AGPL is avoided even more.
  - gowld 6y ago
    AGPL is avoided because cloud/server corporations know exactly what it means. It's expressly written to ban their business models. Likewise for GPLv3 and Tivoized corporations.
ricardobeat 6y ago
The license JSHint is moving to is MIT. It is by far the most common license used in OSS libraries and it allows usage or re-licensing in proprietary software. That is the context from which I'm speaking, where enforcing openness through legal means is not a concern as the license is permissive (I imagine you were thinking of protecting GPL software, which is kind of the opposite situation). There have been zero court cases involving legal dispute over MIT licensed software.
- geofft 6y ago
  Right, the unmodified MIT license is fine. There haven't been any cases precisely because of how unambiguous it is in giving permission. The question is, how do I know that a contributor to software under the JSLint license (perhaps a corporation that paid an employee to contribute something) won't sue me on the grounds that I'm doing evil with their code?

falcolas 6y ago

IMO, the fact that lawyers can't even agree on the scope of the AGPL means that semantics are just that, semantics. Many licenses haven't been tried in court, including the AGPL, yet it's used fairly broadly.

javagram 6y ago
AGPL is widely avoided by corporations precisely because of this problem... Corporations vastly prefer BSD/MIT style licenses or at most GPLv2. GPLv3 is avoided, AGPL is avoided even more.
- gowld 6y ago
  AGPL is avoided because cloud/server corporations know exactly what it means. It's expressly written to ban their business models. Likewise for GPLv3 and Tivoized corporations.

ricardobeat 6y ago

The license JSHint is moving to is MIT. It is by far the most common license used in OSS libraries and it allows usage or re-licensing in proprietary software. That is the context from which I'm speaking, where enforcing openness through legal means is not a concern as the license is permissive (I imagine you were thinking of protecting GPL software, which is kind of the opposite situation). There have been zero court cases involving legal dispute over MIT licensed software.

geofft 6y ago
Right, the unmodified MIT license is fine. There haven't been any cases precisely because of how unambiguous it is in giving permission. The question is, how do I know that a contributor to software under the JSLint license (perhaps a corporation that paid an employee to contribute something) won't sue me on the grounds that I'm doing evil with their code?