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Not a lawyer, have no law training...but I have a hard time seeing how any other interpretation than this court would be viable. At its heart, this is a matter

Not a lawyer, have no law training...but I have a hard time seeing how any other interpretation than this court would be viable. At its heart, this is a matter of contradictory clauses in a contract. One clause says you can't do something, the other says you can. Why should one clause automatically trump the other? In cases like this, a court has to interpret what the parties intended the contract to mean. The licensor had full authority to set the terms, and willingly chose to modify the original license. It's unreasonable to conclude that they went out of their way to add a restriction that they intended everyone to be able to remove. At best each time this comes up a court is going to need to evaluate the circumstances objectively, which is itself a fatal flaw for a boilerplate license that tries to avoid these exact nuances.

wtallis 5y ago
> it's unreasonable to conclude that they went out of their way to add a restriction that they intended everyone to be able to remove. They added a restriction, but did not remove the portions of the original license that are in conflict with that restriction. So their actions paint at best a murky picture of what their intentions were; either their intentions were strange, or they were remarkably incompetent in crafting their license to fit their intentions. It seems to be a bit of a stretch to say the courts must interpret it as if it's the license they should have written, rather than the license they actually wrote.
- josefx 5y ago
  The court documents at one point call that contradiction out as being nonsensical. A license cannot prevent the licensor from choosing restrictions, so interpreting the AGPL in a way that automatically nullifies those does not make sense in this context.
- dTal 5y ago
  >paint at best a murky picture Going out of your way to add something that you wrote is very clearly a more intentional and conscious act than failing to remove something that someone else wrote. The picture is crystal clear. >they were remarkably incompetent in crafting their license Perhaps. Irrelevant. >It seems to be a bit of a stretch to say the courts must interpret it as if it's the license they should have written That's the only possible resolution mechanism when someone writes a self-contradictory contract. Law is not code. Intention matters.
hnfong 5y ago
FWIW, the FSF's stance has been that the (A?)GPL is not a contract. After all these years, I still don't know whether they knew the flaws in their legal reasoning and just went along with it regardless, or whether they truly believed in their claims...

wtallis 5y ago

> it's unreasonable to conclude that they went out of their way to add a restriction that they intended everyone to be able to remove. They added a restriction, but did not remove the portions of the original license that are in conflict with that restriction. So their actions paint at best a murky picture of what their intentions were; either their intentions were strange, or they were remarkably incompetent in crafting their license to fit their intentions. It seems to be a bit of a stretch to say the courts must interpret it as if it's the license they should have written, rather than the license they actually wrote.

josefx 5y ago
The court documents at one point call that contradiction out as being nonsensical. A license cannot prevent the licensor from choosing restrictions, so interpreting the AGPL in a way that automatically nullifies those does not make sense in this context.
dTal 5y ago
>paint at best a murky picture Going out of your way to add something that you wrote is very clearly a more intentional and conscious act than failing to remove something that someone else wrote. The picture is crystal clear. >they were remarkably incompetent in crafting their license Perhaps. Irrelevant. >It seems to be a bit of a stretch to say the courts must interpret it as if it's the license they should have written That's the only possible resolution mechanism when someone writes a self-contradictory contract. Law is not code. Intention matters.

hnfong 5y ago

FWIW, the FSF's stance has been that the (A?)GPL is not a contract. After all these years, I still don't know whether they knew the flaws in their legal reasoning and just went along with it regardless, or whether they truly believed in their claims...