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Doesn't give much information about how they were generated


Both, I imagine

Have you considered offering free storage for freely licensed (cc-by & cc-by-sa) works?

I want to share my photos under a free license, but the one thing that always put me off Flickr was that I would have to pay an indefinite subscription to contribute to the commons.


As far as I know, we haven't considered that, but it's a good idea. I'll noodle on it. Thanks!

Is that not what Wikimedia is for?

The fact that the addictional terms are basically designed to defeat the original licence should make it clear to anyone that it isn't a "reasonable legal notice".

IMO this is a great illustration of how the word "reasonable" stops the entire legal system collapsing.


Contract law uses Contra proferentem ("interpretation against the draftsman") principle: Ambiguous or confusing contract is interpreted against the party that provided the wording. It's amazing principle that makes things reasonable. Trying to be intentionally sneaky and confusing backfires.

Contra proferentem is most important with "contracts of adhesion" like OSS licences that are pre-written contracts which are strict take-it or leave-it, leaving no opportunity for a party to bargain over specific contractual terms. Because the party does not have an opportunity to negotiate they may reasonably interpret a term in a different manner than the contract offeror intended.

The court would likely rule that the more comprehensive document takes precedence (exactly what the AGPLv3 intended.) Less likely outcome is that the court decides there was no valid license at all. This would technically be copyright infringement, but they almost certainly wouldn't issue sanctions because of the innocent infringer principle. Sneaky Company, Inc. messed the license writing and that makes copyright infringement understandable.


But the key question is will the court accept it as an AGP License or accept the argument that it shouldn't be considered an AGPL licence but a derivative one with extra terms (because it has been modified)? If it is the latter, then everyone using their code would need to comply, in my opinion.

That's not the question. There is an AGPL there and extra terms so that would not be under dispute either side. It would be derivative one from the start.

The court would have to decide the rules of construction in the contract and what to do with conflicting clauses. They would verify what Section 7 says. They would ask "Did the Sneaky Company lead the users to believe they had a license with AGPLv3 terms", was there room for confusion? Was the license ambiguity given that it was take-or-leave it style unfair to users?

The court would probably see evidence from company web site, and public communication to see how they advertised the software. If the company mentions AGPL and is vague about extra terms, it would be bad for the Sneaky Company.


I feel like I am missing too much background here. If there is only one licensor, why add terms to defeat the license it chose rather than choose a license which does not need defeating?

I imagine it's easier to attribute a fragment of writing to a well known work, rather than a previously unknown one.

Tangential, but does anyone else keep reading "MLP" as "my little pony".

Preventing a more serious harm (Necessity) is a common law defence against most crimes.

Kinda, most hams are very rhadamanthine about following every tiny rule to the letter, or their even stricter interpretation of the spirit. The type of people who complain about young people not joining the hobby while insisting on maintaining strict licensing rules and tests. It's very much the polar opposite of hacker ethic.

The two biggest ham people I've known both, independently and separated by years, discussed enjoying war driving looking for "pirate" radio signals that they can report to the FCC. Amusing to find this is a cultural aspect of ham radio licensees.

Off topic but rhadamanthine? Is this word zeitgeist now?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhadamanthine

It's just a word I like to use, it has a nice sound to it.


Nice, I hadn't heard that word before - thanks!

I've got friends in the scene and their behavior about it reminds me of other types of friends I have

1. Amateur pilots

2. People late in their years getting into martials arts for the first time (will be the loudest "KIYA"s in the class and always doing the most aggressive deep bows lol)

3. Non libertarian gun nuts. Oh buddy the attention they pay to everything from how you load your gun at the range to how you've had it packed in your car.

I have specific individuals in mind for each of these categories and I say this without ill intent, I'm not trying to disparage this behavior, it just seems to be a specific kinda thing, where following the exact letter of written direction seems to be half the fun for them.

This in opposition to some other types I know who aren't having fun unless SOME rule is being broken...


Chairman Trump will have a semiconductor furnace in every backyard.

You have to surrender your silicon(e) to the state!

Actually possible if you mount google drive and move your swap file there.

This is the most pathological technology I have heard of in a long time and I am not even going to apologize for upvoting and telling other people about the evil genius I found on the internet today.

icymi https://scp-iota.github.io/software/2025/06/16/download-ram-...

tldr it's not theorical, some madman actually did that!


How about swap on pingfs so you aren't relying on some cloud provider?

https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs


I've thought about doing stuff like that (or mounting S3), but I've never done it because I figured that the latency would be enormous and it would be too slow to actually be useful.

That said, I could actually kind of see it being useful for stuff that doesn't need to be super fast but does allocate a lot of RAM (though I'm drawing a blank on what that would be at the moment).


Enormous latency is all relative. A network drive on a local network holding a swap file would still outperform some number of computers I've owned that put their swap on much, much slower hard drives of their time. Of course, nobody was trying to swap two gigabytes to these drives as that would have been 10 times their capacity....

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