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My experience talking to big corp IP lawyers is they have a set of policies ("open source bad; protecting our IP good") and will make up any justification to support those policies, even if their justifications are plainly incorrect given the license text. Usually they just stop responding when you point out the obvious contradiction. It'd be one thing if they just said "no" with no justification, but my experience is they spout a bunch of false stuff about open source licensing, then explain how that false stuff violates their policies even though the real license actually doesn't, and then stop talking when you show them that they are wrong.

As you say, their job is to protect the company, not actually understand how IP works. But it's pretty silly when some stupid dev like me knows their supposed area of expertise better than they do.



Well, it's great that you have that understanding. But the internet is full of FOSS types fantasy IANALing based half-forgotten RMS FAQs, even in places where they really should know better. Most of these nerd arguments are pretty much worthless if it came to a courtroom.


Yeah, I said I was stupid. What's their excuse? :)




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