Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mattigames 1209 days ago
From his/her wording I assume they mean some unspecified threshold before a group of people is considered a corporation. From my limited understanding I think it could be useful to have a license that is only for free for organizations made of (for example) 10 people or less.
1 comments

The license is only granted to natural born persons.

The only people who don't grasp this simple fact are the ones who have never worked in a corporation. They very much own and run things legally. Which is why when the liquidation man comes a knocking you don't lose your shirt for owning stock in Enron.

Now let's say somebody in a corp uses the software for some minor task. Are they allowed? Is it the person or the corp "using" it?

If the latter, let's say me and my buddy both use the software individually, legally. We sit in the same room. Ok? We are together working on some non-profit project not involving the software. Ok? Now we use the software for it. Ok? Niw we make a profit. Ok?

Where do you draw the line?

RMS would be pretty opposed to these ideas.

> Now let's say somebody in a corp uses the software for some minor task. Are they allowed? Is it the person or the corp "using" it?

Not allowed.

>If the latter, let's say me and my buddy both use the software individually, legally. We sit in the same room. Ok? We are together working on some non-profit project not involving the software. Ok? Now we use the software for it. Ok? Niw we make a profit. Ok?

All allowed.

The answer to all those questions are pretty simple and straight forward. I'm not sure why you're trying to muddy the waters here.

>RMS would be pretty opposed to these ideas.

RMS has failed catastrophically in his goal of letting users have access to the source code of the applications they use. I don't really care for what he has to say.

>RMS has failed catastrophically in his goal of letting users have access to the source code of the applications they use. I don't really care for what he has to say

I don't know how you can say that unless you have impossibly high standards. If it wasn't for the GPL, Intel and AMD would have had zero incentive to opensource their drivers. NVIDIA and arm drivers are still proprietary but panfrost is in development. In an alternative timeline it is plausible that none of this would have happened.