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Originally Posted by frabjous
First of all, there are licenses, such as some of the Creative Commons licenses, which are for all intents and purposes conditional public domain.
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No, they are not. CC licenses are no different from the note that gaming books add to their character sheet pages--"permission is granted to copy for personal use." Or from licensing a nonprofit org to make copies of a book to distribute.
The license is offered to the general public, but it's still very much a license on use that could be restricted by copyright. The fact that we've come to think of copyright as meaning either "nobody can use it unless they pay me" or "PD; anyone can do anything they want with it" is a problem resulting from litigious corporations; copyrighted material that's widely used with permission has been around for a long time.
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It may be that Knuth would have to make the legal issues clearer, but there's nothing preventing him from doing so, and I can't imagine any roadblocks here. What, specifically, do you see as a legal hurdle here? You speak vaguely. Who is going to be suing whom? Do you honestly think Knuth is going to file a lawsuit with Amazon or Sony if they put TeX software on their readers and charge for the hardware?
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I suspect that the issue is not whether Knuth would sue (see me pretend I know who or what Knuth is), but whether Sony, for example, were to put months and thousands of dollars into developing a TeX interpreter in an ebook reader, only to have that research snatched out from under them by their competitors, who could buy a reader, and grab the software to install on their own devices.
Sony's not worried about Knuth suing; they're trying (I'm hypothesizing) to protect their ability to sue Amazon for copying their code. If the code is open source, or some variant of a CC share-alike license, that may not be possible.