Is it a dirty industry secret that most people/companies who use these open source libraries are violating their licenses, especially around the distribution? I always see great libraries posted on HN, but I don't see how anyone can actually use them, in a professional setting.
Then either your company is doing something evil or those lawyers are idiots. Nothing in the GPL treats commercial use any differently than non-commercial use, and you're allowed to distribute GPL'd software as long as you make the GPL'd source available to whoever you make the binaries available to.
Or, perhaps compliance for this is their exact concern.
For GPL software, yes.
GPL still allows commercial use in any case, it just requires you release your code under GPL.
https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko/blob/main/LICENSE
IANAL, and I didn't ask for an explanation, but I suspect the problem was that I was making a library, which, from my uneducated reading, would qualify as a derived work.
I know our company is especially strict since, from my understanding, significant enough money has already been spent on legal fees.