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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

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saagarjha

I think you should get new lawyers if this is their understanding of how software licenses work.

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See for example https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

> Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MUST NOT be used at Google.

It’s their loss

Is it? Because open source tools re-licensing themselves to be more permissive would seem to indicate whose loss it really is.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. it could take about a century, but every software company (hardware maybe next century) is in the process of being swallowed by free software. Thats not to say people can’t carve out a niche and have balling corporate retreats for a while.. until the sleeping giant wakes up and rolls over you.

You've just made a pretty outrageous claim without evidence that would require a lot of effort on my part to refute, so I'll just go with: if you say so.

Free software basically only exists because it’s subsidized by nonfree software. It also has no original ideas. Every piece of good free software is just a copy of something proprietary or some internal tool.

Do you have any kind of source for such claims?

This might indicate moreso that they believe they won't lose anything by the transition and users might ultimately benefit

I'm wondering if you've ever actually asked a real corporate lawyer for an opinion on anything relating to GPL licenses. The results are pretty consistent. I've made the trip on three occasions, and the response each time was: "this was not drafted by a lawyer, it's virtually ininterpretable, and it is wildly unpredictable what the consequences of using this software are."

Why do some companies engage with it then?

Eh, all the GNU family of licenses were drafted by lawyers.

Just using any Copyleft software has no legal consequences (copyleft licenses kick in when distributing, not using them).

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