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Right, so the risk can't be quantified and the whole thing is just isomorphic "because I don't like it". Which was as true then as it is now. It's not about license terms, it's about what amounts to politics.


Experimenting is not the only way to quantify risk. You can also e.g. have several highly paid lawyers look over the text of the license, and see what each of them had to say.

The big players in the industry did just that, and there appears to be a remarkable consensus on it.


The remarkable consensus behind IBM's purchase of Red Hat, you mean? Seems like their highly paid lawyers were down with it.

Again, it's just stunning the extent to which this FUD hasn't changed at all over a quarter century.


The GPLv3 was intentionally designed to create the risk that Apple and others are trying to avoid. IBM doesn't have that risk because they don't sell hardware or software packages, they sell expensive service contracts.


Red Hat, a division of IBM, literally does almost $3B of revenue selling a Linux distribution that includes almost the entirety of the GNU corpus, all GPLv3. IBM bought them because they already resell packages and contracts based on the same stuff and wanted the vertical integration. So yeah, you buy an expensive service contract from IBM and it comes with (gasp) a giant license for GPLv3 stuff in RHEL.

That point is silly. If what you say were true, then the purchase would have been poison. It's not true. It's FUD. And it's hilariously the same FUD that people were flinging around in years before most of the existing FUD-flingers were even born.


The corporate risk profile of Apple vs IBM is so drastically different that it's not even a serious comparison.


> It's not about license terms, it's about what amounts to politics.

Which is exactly what the GPL is! Especially v3.




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