Right, as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45096736, simply running GPL programs is probably fine. Input/output that doesn't establish "intimate communication" probably doesn't create a combined work, but "shipping complex data structures back and forth" does, according to the FSF.

There isn't a similar degree of legal risk with MPL 2.0, nor with non-copyleft licenses (which is the subject of this subthread, not proprietary licenses) -- whether or not a plugin counts as a combined work, there are no requirements on you.

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lmm 6 days ago | parent [-]

> There isn't a similar degree of legal risk with MPL 2.0, nor with non-copyleft licenses (which is the subject of this subthread, not proprietary licenses)

There is a similar degree of legal risk with the overwhelming majority of licenses in use. Yes, using exclusively permissively-licensed software would let you avoid this particular risk - but given that essentially no-one (BSD advocates are, if anything, less scrupulous about avoiding proprietary software than GPL advocates - you rarely hear of BSD-land pushing firmware into a separate nonfree repository or the like) does that, it's clearly not a risk many people care much about.

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sunshowers 5 days ago | parent [-]

Is your position that the FSF is wrong? If so, why trust the licenses that the same FSF wrote?

In general, businesses acquire commercial licenses for proprietary software, which is a kind of derisking.

	▲	lmm 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Is your position that the FSF is wrong? If so, why trust the licenses that the same FSF wrote? The FSF says a program that exchanges complex data structures with the covered program "can" be something that requires a license; they don't claim that it always or usually is. My position is that they're correct that it's possible (at least in some jurisdictions) but the risk is low in cases where you're not trying to do a technological end run around something you obviously need a license for. > In general, businesses acquire commercial licenses for proprietary software, which is a kind of derisking. Only if the license grants permission to do the thing you're doing! Otherwise you're no better off than if you had no license (and you're worse off than under the GPL, which at least permits you to prepare derivative works freely, only putting conditions on distributing them). Almost every commercial/proprietary license I've seen has a blanket prohibition on preparing or distributing derivative works.