News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Lego violates GPL by keep Blender-based BrickLink Studio ... by deathanatos on Thursday March 16, 2023 @05:12PM (#35188730)
No, they're not? "pay and you're set" to do what is the question, then.

IANAL. Let's take VSCode as an example. At the very least, the license:

1. permits data collection on your machine.

2. restricts the user: no reverse engineering, no disassembly, no decompile. No alteration of any "notices" from MS (or others). No distribution (…ish, there are some exceptions? it's complicated?).

3. a $5 limit on damages, which is … interesting.

And to be fair to MS, I think this is one of the shorter and clearer proprietary licenses that I've found. But it is hardly "pay and you're set". (Hell, "pay" — the price is free^W your data, here.)

But a further part of the complication is the mere distinction of proprietary-ness of the license. The GPL is the GPL, and once I've read it, and made a decision on the terms of it, a piece of software can signal its license with "GPLv2" or such, and I can essentially get a cache-hit on my legal interpretation of the license. Every proprietary license is a cache-miss, and is thus immensely more time consuming to process.

There are no comments on this comment yet.