> it's unreasonable to conclude that they went out of their way to add a restriction that they intended everyone to be able to remove.
They added a restriction, but did not remove the portions of the original license that are in conflict with that restriction. So their actions paint at best a murky picture of what their intentions were; either their intentions were strange, or they were remarkably incompetent in crafting their license to fit their intentions. It seems to be a bit of a stretch to say the courts must interpret it as if it's the license they should have written, rather than the license they actually wrote.
Going out of your way to add something that you wrote is very clearly a more intentional and conscious act than failing to remove something that someone else wrote. The picture is crystal clear.
>they were remarkably incompetent in crafting their license
Perhaps. Irrelevant.
>It seems to be a bit of a stretch to say the courts must interpret it as if it's the license they should have written
That's the only possible resolution mechanism when someone writes a self-contradictory contract. Law is not code. Intention matters.
The court documents at one point call that contradiction out as being nonsensical. A license cannot prevent the licensor from choosing restrictions, so interpreting the AGPL in a way that automatically nullifies those does not make sense in this context.
They added a restriction, but did not remove the portions of the original license that are in conflict with that restriction. So their actions paint at best a murky picture of what their intentions were; either their intentions were strange, or they were remarkably incompetent in crafting their license to fit their intentions. It seems to be a bit of a stretch to say the courts must interpret it as if it's the license they should have written, rather than the license they actually wrote.