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sunshowerslast Tuesday at 7:05 PM1 replyview on HN

Is your position that the FSF is wrong? If so, why trust the licenses that the same FSF wrote?

In general, businesses acquire commercial licenses for proprietary software, which is a kind of derisking.


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lmmlast Wednesday at 1:19 AM

> Is your position that the FSF is wrong? If so, why trust the licenses that the same FSF wrote?

The FSF says a program that exchanges complex data structures with the covered program "can" be something that requires a license; they don't claim that it always or usually is. My position is that they're correct that it's possible (at least in some jurisdictions) but the risk is low in cases where you're not trying to do a technological end run around something you obviously need a license for.

> In general, businesses acquire commercial licenses for proprietary software, which is a kind of derisking.

Only if the license grants permission to do the thing you're doing! Otherwise you're no better off than if you had no license (and you're worse off than under the GPL, which at least permits you to prepare derivative works freely, only putting conditions on distributing them). Almost every commercial/proprietary license I've seen has a blanket prohibition on preparing or distributing derivative works.