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."
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.
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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).