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As a developer of commercial software, this strikes me as a lot of paranoia, although I do agree with one or two points.

These types of agreements have to be somewhat broadly written so that if someone acts like a jerk and e.g. resells Datomic as a cloud service, the license has a way to stop that. It has nothing to do with preventing you from privately installing your Datomic instance on AWS, or otherwise being a reasonable customer.

Companies generally have a strong interest in being fair to their customers. Taking the most paranoid reading of the license text like it is constitutional law and tyranny is right around the corner is simply incorrect and unfair.

I invite comment on my own license: https://wukix.com/mocl-license-agreement (for https://wukix.com/mocl)



Which parts specifically would you consider paranoid? Issues similar to those pointed to by DPP (e.g. those found in the License Grant and Restrictions sections) have been used many times by software vendors to extort fees from licensees. And before you say that this would surely take such vendors out of business in short order, please know that this approach has been used by some of the worlds most successful software companies who are still very much around and well (at least financially).


For starters, objecting to the anti-criminality clauses seems paranoid. Granted, if you're a human rights organization under a hostile government, maybe you need to worry about this. But otherwise, what is the problem? Does one really need the ability to write viruses with Datomic? WTF?

Can you point to any specific examples of the extortionate behavior you describe? I imagine some companies cry extortion when they get nailed for genuine infringement (e.g., lots of unlicensed installs), but I would like to see an example where a software vendor went truly tyrannical on a customer that was actually using the software as agreed and intended.




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