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Sebastian_Hagen comments on Disclosure vs. Bans: Reply to Robin Hanson - Less Wrong
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I think the standard economists' reply is off-base in this case, because the problem is not a lack of information, but too much information. A typical credit card agreement fills up several 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper in very small print. The credit card company has many lawyers who collectively know every word in that document. Most people are incapable of understanding an entire credit-card agreement. People don't read them any more than they read the 10-page terms of agreement you have to click on to "agree to" with almost every piece of commercial (and even free) software you install nowadays. Did you know you are not allowed to use Cygwin at work? Did you know you cannot use Java to develop software for use in nuclear power applications? Did you even read to the end of this paragraph?
Would it be more acceptable to a libertarian to see the government legislate a limit on the length of different types of contracts that can be offered to consumers, than to legislate their content?
(While they're at it, I'd like to see a legal limit to the length of legislation, too. Like a law saying that Congress, in a given term, cannot pass more than 30 pages of legislation for every day they've been in session.)
Limiting length might have the result that contracts would get even harder to read, as lawyers used terser language to say things more succinctly. Wait - no, I'm not afraid of that happening.
I didn't, and you shouldn't either - because it isn't true. Cygwin doesn't have a uniform license; it's split between public domain, X11-like and GNU GPL (version >= 2). The most restrictive of these is the GNU GPL, and there is nothing in that license prohibiting use of the software for commercial purposes, or even selling copies of it - it's just that if you give anyone a binary which either includes or links against code you've licensed under the GPL, you also have to give them the source, and if you give someone such code (either source or object), you also have to give them all the freedoms for the entire package the GPL gave to you.
One practical upshot of all this is that if you use or link against GPL code, you probably won't be able to make money by distributing the resulting binaries according to a traditional proprietary software business model. But there's nothing preventing you from using GPLed software (either as distributed, or modified to your needs) for business purposes, selling gadgets that run GPLed software, or any of a bunch of other things.
You appear to be technically right, based on this. I remember reading the Cygwin license several years ago and concluding that I couldn't use it at work; now I can't remember if that was because of the GPL.
In practice, you can rarely use GPLed software libraries for development unless you work for a nonprofit. Cygwin is not a library, so you can use it as an operating system with no restrictions. I can't remember now why I was so worried about they licensing terms. Perhaps they were different then.
That's a gross overgeneralization.
That seems to overstate it rather - it's a generalisation, but it's mostly true. Most software written for for-profit employers isn't GPL, and is often distributed even if only to a client or to other employees, so can't link to GPLed libraries directly. Still that's a long way from saying you can't use Cygwin at work. Sebastian Hagen's comment seems accurate to me.
Distributing to fellow employees is still internal to the company, is it not? So that would not trigger the public source clause.