Comment by macksd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macksd | Hacker News Reader

While this is funny, it does highlight that you should probably have an actual legal opinion if you decide to write your own license. A less tongue-in-cheek example that I've run into is https://dst.lbl.gov/ACSSoftware/colt/license.html. "any usage related to military applications is expressly forbidden", which is still poorly defined enough that it makes lots of corporate lawyers nervous and you end up having to remove those packages even for stuff that isn't really a military application just because it's not clear how military-adjacent something is allowed to be. It's especially ironic since it's being distributed by a Department of Energy national lab. I wonder if DOE national labs ever have military applications...

It's also not clear to me that this does actually make it illegal for the military to just use it directly, even if they cared about following the letter of the law. If copyright is the real power behind the enforcement of open-source licenses, I'm not sure usage is something the license grantor gets to dictate as long as you're not redistributing something.

For those not aware, DoE is literally responsible for the design, testing, and manufacture of US nuclear weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_En...

In the Soviet Union, they gave its counterpart a wonderfully euphemistic name of "Ministry of Medium Machinery Building". Everyone knows what is "heavy machinery" and while "light machinery" is not a thing one could imagine what it could mean, but medium machinery? What the hell could that even be?

I mean... no?

There is nothing compelling these organisations to use that particular piece of software. When contacted the author could just shrug and say "not my problem" and the organisation would just have to find some other software to use.

The author has no obligation to make things easier for people that don't know if they are doing evil or not, or if they are military or not.

There's nothing compelling the author, no, except for in the situation outlined above they're really doing nothing to prevent military use, but they are hampering adoption among companies scrupulous or careful enough to not run afoul of a poorly defined legal term. Seems counter-productive to the apparent motives.

Only law abiding people follow the law too, what's the point of them?

Laws that are at least somewhat enforced can be good. Laws that are never enforced are counterproductive.

Depends, if the alternative is those laws are changed or removed from the statute books, their existence counterproductive for sure.

If the alternative is all the bad laws society regularly bends or ignores outright (suggesting there’s little or no democratic support for them) start being aggressively enforced, I’ll take never enforced every time.

In many societies there’s plenty of the latter.

There isn't even a law preventing direct military usage of that library as far as I understand, because they're not violating copyright law by just downloading something, which by the way is hosted using federal funds. But the absurdity of high energy physics / national nuclear research labs saying you can't use the software for military applications, and then this mainly comes up in civilian applications with nervous lawyers? Yeah it's missing the point more than you seem to be implying.

With something like this, the apparent motive is more likely to signal to other people his views on the military, more so than actually preventing them from using the software.

Can you be certain about that? Has anyone tried to test a no military use clause in court?

This sort of confusing 'anti-pentagon' license goes back to way back when, and was supposedly one of the reasons RMS established "Freedom Zero" to run the software "for any purpose". But yeah, high energy physics just might have military applications...

Can confirm DOE labs work on military adjacent things all the time

Yes my question was, itself, tongue-in-cheek. I've been told that a customer insisted the packages in question be removed because although they did nothing military-related, they did happen to have a customer that is well-known for being a contractor on military projects and they didn't want to be getting in trouble just because their civilian service was used by a civilian company that did military-adjacent work.

And even if LBL isn't developing nuclear weapons they seem a mite closer to it than that.

Hmm, doesn't the LGPL allow you to remove any additional restrictions?

Interesting - do you mean because of the "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed" clause? I wonder.

No, the GPLv3 includes this language:

> All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

And the LGPLv3 incorporates the GPLv3 by reference, then grants additional permissions.

It says it does, but in at least one lawsuit courts have outright said that this language does not apply to copyright holders. Which is explicitly opposed to the FSF's own intent drafting the license, which was to prohibit copyright owners from calling their license "GPL plus (insert nonfree clause here)"

It is like the license needs a bootstrapping license

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