Re:What an effing minefield (Score 1)

it is unlike in some aspects, but in general, almost all licence agreements that exceed two sentences have weird clauses, clauses that are open to misinterpretation and so on.

What makes the GPL so unique is that it causes you to enter into an agreement with a poorly defined "other party." Generally when a company (especially a large company) enters into a licensing agreement, it has someone in particular it can contact to negotiate undesirable (to the company) clauses. With GPL'ed code, this is often impossible because of the large number of poorly identified submitters and lack of clarity as to who is authorized to speak for them. Even opensource projects run into this (c.f. OpenOffice.org versus NeoOffice license incompatibilities, or efforts to relicense large projects from GPL to BSD).

Large companies also have a pretty good idea of what licensing clauses they can litigate around and even ignore (as I've discovered working with large company legal departments). Sometimes when a company licenses something with obscure and difficult clauses, it just ignores them and figures it'll deal with the lawsuit if it ever comes; they can almost always be settled for some small monetary damage, so it's just a cost of doing business. If you complied with every single clause of every agreement you'd ever signed, you couldn't get any work done (this is no different then how individuals generally ignore the numerous agreements they sign all the time including EULAs). You can't easily apply this to the GPL because there's no one you can "buy off" like you can with most agreements. Great for keeping the GPL pure, but very troubling for many companies.