IMO this is a great illustration of how the word "reasonable" stops the entire legal system collapsing.
Software is like sex. It's better when it's free.
The problem here isn't the legal interpretation of the license and adding new clauses doesn't seem to do anything useful. Sneaky Company can license their software under whatever weird combination of terms they like. If they want GPL except it's proprietary then they can do that. Weird but ok. Same again if they want the license to be internally contradictory - seems stupid but they can do that too.
The actual issue is if they're trying to be deceptive by framing something as GPL licensed when in fact it is some new not-in-the-GPL-spirit license that they have developed. They should either be generally shamed or sued by whoever has copyright over the term "GPL" (pretty sure that is the FSF). That'd be ironic but there you go. Or some sort of false advertising suite.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/agpl-is-not-a-tool-for-t... https://lwn.net/Articles/1067771/
If Sneaky Company makes weird and confusing license, it's interpreted against them.
Only if they don't use the text of the GPL to do that, as it's not a freely licensed work (more specifically, they'd have to use a different name, remove mentions of GNU and remove the GPL preamble to be able to use the rest of GPL as a base for their license).
