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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Not a lawyer, but that sounds a bit wishy-washy, which corporate lawyers are really not fond of. It's part of the reason why the JSON standard was problematic for a while, because it had a clause stating that it "should be used for Good, not Evil", which is a legal nightmare.

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Ditto on the not a lawyer aspect, but this seems pretty straightforward:

   You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that
                      you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document
                      Service.

                      A “Document Service” is a commercial offering that
                      allows third parties (other than your employees and
                      contractors) to access the functionality of the
                      Licensed Work by creating teams and documents
                      controlled by such third parties.

It isn't really all that straightforward. The key distinction is in that phrase, "your employees and contractors". What happens if I go through a recruiting agency to hire a contractor, and the contractor is actually an employee of the recruiting agency? Does that contractor get access to my wiki? What happens if I contract with an external design firm? Do their employees get access to my wiki? What happens if I try to cheat this language by providing a wiki service as a B2B enterprise, where I get hired as a contractor (a wiki-provider contractor) to all of these corporation to set up wikis for them?

That language is the sort of seemingly straightforward sounding language that can and does get litigated to death, and I wouldn't blame a corporate lawyer for advising his or her client to steer clear.

Every single example you give either falls under contractor or employee. Simply because you don‘t know legal language, doesn‘t mean lawyers don’t have simple, binary ways to deal with this that fully captures all of your examples. Law is not at all wishy washy in this case. If both employees and contractors are captured, then you‘re literally covered.

What I do agree with, is that any careful corporate lawyer would have a good look at this license and check whether there are any courts that have ever looked at this license to see how battle tested it is. Speaking as a lawyer, what I would see as an edge case that might be problematic is if a competitor of Outline that uses its completely self-built tech stack to provide a competing service as outlined in that clause would use Outline internally as a knowledge base. But I mean that‘d be absurd.

// addendum Personally, I think it would be cool if Outline at some point removed that clause, once it has built sufficient moat around its commodity services.

OTOH:

I can't tell you how many telemedicine (aka, video conferencing) services use Zoom, Google, or GTM as their teleconferencing solution when speaking with prospective clients.

I've literally only had one that was actually using the televideo software they were pitching me as the televideo platform for our demo call. One out of many.

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