My understanding on legal/licensing questions has always been: If it can be reasonably and confidently answered by an experienced programmer, without needing to consult any actual lawyers, then it's okay here.

For instance, it's fair to ask a programmer whether or not you can legally sell a closed-source program that dynamically links to a GPL'd library. Most of us know the answer to that without getting any formal legal advice, and if I chose to qualify my answer with "IANAL", it would be more out of paranoia than anything else. However, if you asked me whether or not the WTFPL is a "risky" license...all I could give you is a vague claim that MIT/Apache/etc are "probably safer", but I have no legal expertise to back up that opinion, and many of these issues have never been tested in court so the honest lawyer answer may simply be "nobody knows yet".

In general, if the question is about the "spirit" of the license, we can probably answer it. Programmers can easily understand things like "GPLv3 is meant to protect against tivoization" without getting a legal degree. I would hope that when we're worried about violating a library's license, we're usually more concerned about violating the library author's wishes then we are about exposing ourselves to some legal action from the author's lawyers.

My understanding on legal/licensing questions has always been: If it can be reasonably and confidently answered by an experienced programmer, without needing to consult any actual lawyers, then it's okay here.

For instance, it's fair to ask a programmer whether or not you can legally sell a closed-source program that dynamically links to a GPL'd library. Most of us know the answer to that without getting any formal legal advice, and if I chose to qualify my answer with "IANAL", it would be more out of paranoia than anything else. However, if you asked me whether or not the WTFPL is a "risky" license...all I could give you is a vague claim that MIT/Apache/etc are "probably safer", but I have no legal expertise to back up that opinion, and many of these issues have never been tested in court so the honest lawyer answer may simply be "nobody knows yet".

In general, if the question is about the "spirit" of the license, we can probably answer it. Programmers can easily understand things like "GPLv3 is meant to protect against tivoization" without going to law school. I would hope that when we're worried about violating a library's license, we're usually more concerned about violating the library author's wishes then we are about exposing ourselves to some legal action from the author's lawyers.