'Joel Dueck' via Racket Users wrote on 8/27/19 12:17 PM:
On Friday, August 23, 2019 at 10:40:13 AM UTC-5, Alexis King wrote:Distributing a closed-source, non-LGPL Racket application without violating Racket’s licensing terms is likely to be very difficult or impossible,This was startling for me to read, as I have been contemplating doing that very thing.
Questions and confusion about software licensing come up all the time, when a conscientious person tries to interpret software licenses.
Open source licenses don't seem as adversarial as many closed software licenses do, but are still confusing. I think one needs the background of a lawyer to even have a credible sense of whether one understands it sufficiently.
If one is doing open source, the open source licenses are so well-worn, with so much precedent, it doesn't appear to be stopping massive amounts of open source work out there.
On the other hand, if one is doing closed software, again, there's a lot of precedent of this working out well, and also, presumably, one is going to be paying a lawyer to draft/vet their own licenses, in any case (regardless of whether one uses Racket, or anything else), which I imagine requires taking a look at licenses of the software one's own software uses. (And that lawyer will be vastly better qualified than myself and most of us to say (I imagine), "OK, this, that, and the other open source license thing are well-accepted, and you're not doing the sneaky thing that causes most problems, so I just have a question about whether this other thing over here is the same thing as what already has a common interpretation". Then, there might be a lawyerly question, that can then be answered in a lawyerly way. But if I tried to ask a lawyerly question, it would be the wrong question, and how I asked it would be wrong 10 different ways.)
After some consideration, I hereby announce my intent to distribute a closed source non-LGPL Racket application sometime within the next year. If anyone with standing has a problem with that, please let me know.
I agree with what I think you're implying: that licensing is unlikely to be a problem. The informality reminds me of a funny bit from "The Office": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuZeff2y32M
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