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by hedora 28 days ago
The beauty of making it a criminal issue is that those costs go away.

When the library vendor licenses some proprietary crap to a game server vendor, they take on the risk that their library may fall under the open source requirement when the game server shuts down.

At shutdown, criminal law says the library vendor must open source. Since criminal law preempts contract law, no amount of weasel words in the software license change that.

Even if the upstream vendor is out of business or something and did not provide source, surely, the binaries fall under the the open source clause.

Problem completely solved, and no lawyers need to be paid after the fact. (Library vendors might want to pay lawyers to tell them not to license to game servers, or not. Either way, that's not the customers' problem.)