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> What are you on about? The explicit purpose of a license is that it's users do not have to worry about anyone else's "explicit intent". A license needs to be unambigious about it's terms, else it's just not a good license, hence see the discussion in this thread about the meaning of derivative works.

Even the most carefully written license has ambiguity, and that's for two reasons. First, we want to cover situations without exhaustively enumerating and describing them in great detail. Statutes and the Constitution run into this all the time, but no one's like "don't start a business in the US, their Constitution is ambiguous and courts have to clarify and interpret it all the time" because courts (except for this one, I'll admit) do things like take reliance interests into account when adjudicating cases. It works well enough in contract law that we've built the most advanced economy in history, so I wouldn't poo-poo it.

Second, and I'll echo Dijkstra here [0] our languages aren't precise. They're bad at the thing you want them to do. Your argument argues against all contracts and licenses everywhere, even laws themselves.

Finally, (A)GPLv3 don't refer to derivative works. That's a GPLv2 thing.

> I'm surprised that people on an US centric site believe that intent in US jurisprudence matters, because in a legal system largely based on precedence, it really does not.

Again, happy to read any case law you can find on this.

> You have to do the same thing in order to use API's. I'm sorry, unless I don't understand something here, this doesn't make sense.

I'm starting to believe people here don't know what linking and incorporate mean. Linking is using a linker--like ld--to build an executable or library. It's not some abstract idea of linkage. Incorporate means pulling the source code into your own. It's not some abstract idea of building a larger system. You don't pull the source code to Minio into your code to use its API.

0: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...



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