Re:We Love GPLv3, but Are Switching License to Apache 2.0
by dTal on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @05:01AM
(#25357016)
Yes, the boundaries are fuzzy; that's typical in law. The "reasonable person" language is not my invention, and it's assumed that somewhere along the line someone is going to have to fight in court over the particulars of ambiguous cases. The ambiguity is a strength - it forces compliance with the spirit of the wording, instead of risking litigation by trying to find a technical loophole.
Software engineers consistently underestimate the degree to which law is not like coding.
I think reasonable people would disagree with each other.
macOS used to come with iTunes preinstalled, but you could remove it by turning off SIP and running `sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app` in the Terminal. I always did so, because iTunes sucks, and the rest of the OS always continued to work fine.
Is iTunes a part of macOS, or is iTunes a separate piece of software? Would it matter if you could remove iTunes through Finder, or without turning off SIP? Would it matter if iTunes wasn't included with macOS, but was automatically downloaded and installed a day later? Would it matter if iTunes was created by a third party, or if macOS couldn't output any audio without it?
What about Google Play Services? DirectX? ZFS? I could certainly make a case for how I think each of these should be classified, but I don't think it's at all obvious.