| > the author itself is free to sue you the way he/she can (eg, patents). One example could be dotNet from M$. That's not actually true. In law, at least in the US, there's such a thing called Estompel [1], and licenses like BSD / MIT do have an implicit patents grant [2], unless the software is also accompanied by an explicit patents license (like Microsoft is doing), in which case that license takes precedence. Of course, you can't be totally safe with an implicit patents grant, because its applicability depends on jurisdiction, plus it's always unclear if you can also count on it for derived works, etc. But then again, this is why GPL v2 is still safe. Remember that the Linux kernel is licensed under GPL v2? So what, are we all screwed? > note that you can trust "free software" guys more than "open source" ones. With all due respect, but many "free software" guys tend to be zealots and I can't take them seriously anymore. Not when the FSF starts doing stupid shit, like preventing Emacs on MacOS from supporting emoji just because the "free operating systems" would be at a disadvantage. Talk about crazy. Also, in my opinion AGPL does not pass the OSI definition and it was probably accepted only because it would have brought out the crazy, but that's a personal opinion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel [2] http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Implicit_patent_grant [3] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NE... |