From bob@RATTLESNAKE.COM Tue Mar 27 16:21:57 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: bob@rattlesnake.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_4); 28 Mar 2001 00:21:57 -0000 Received: (qmail 9631 invoked from network); 28 Mar 2001 00:21:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 28 Mar 2001 00:21:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO megalith.rattlesnake.com) (140.186.114.245) by mta3 with SMTP; 28 Mar 2001 01:22:59 -0000 Received: by rattlesnake.com via sendmail from stdin id (Debian Smail3.2.0.111) for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Tue, 27 Mar 2001 19:21:41 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 19:21:41 -0500 (EST) To: jcowan@reutershealth.com Cc: bob@RATTLESNAKE.COM, rlpowell@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca, lojban@yahoogroups.com In-reply-to: <3AC12625.2090500@reutershealth.com> (message from John Cowan on Tue, 27 Mar 2001 18:45:41 -0500) Subject: Re: [lojban] jbofi'e version 0.36 released Reply-to: bob@rattlesnake.com References: <20010327223944.B334@rrbcurnow.freeuk.com> <20010327165422.J11825@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca> <3AC12625.2090500@reutershealth.com> X-eGroups-From: "Robert J. Chassell" From: "Robert J. Chassell" X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 6254 >From using a *specific* derivative of it, namely the one Badco wrote; not from using *any* derivative of it. You can always do what Stallman did with LMLisp: duplicate the changes yourself. Nope. Not unless you are willing to spend lots and lots of money. The word is `plagerism'. You can be accused of it, and to prove your innocence takes lots of money. It would be nice if it did not, but that is the way the world is. Why do you think Stallman became concerned with getting proper legal papers in the 1980s? > even if you are the person making the changes and your changes > are somewhat different from theirs and independently. If your changes are different from theirs and made independently, then your work cannot be a derivative work of Badco's. Not true ... see above. > The BSD license does permit that: taking even from the author. It does not permit taking the author's work from the author. Oh yes it does. Not everyone realizes this. But it permits taking any derived work. > And remember, if you ever get into this deeper, `derived work' is a > legal term -- it means what courts say it means... Indeed. No public license has yet had to face a court test. A late friend of mine, a lawyer once told me: Any lawyer can write you a contract. A good lawyer writes you a contract that wins in court. So far, when threatened by legal action, every company that has tried to sneak past the GPL has given in before going to court. Why? In the cases I know of, and I suspect in all the others, their lawyers have said: "You have two choices: to give up now or to lose later. It is cheaper for you to give up now. So give up now." Of course, I and others expect that some company with extraordinary funding, perhaps from an unknown source, will eventually appear and fight a court case that to an outsider seems destined to lose, but which will cost the defender huge amounts of money and time in the meantime. *You*, I take it, are ready to spend 250,000 US dollars, and more likely, four to eight times as much, and time out of your life, just to defend *your* right to distribute code that you yourself have written with no help or input from anyone else. If you are not -- or if you are not allied with someone who is -- you are `not real'. Of course, if your work is not considered sufficiently worthwhile by profitable thieves, then the probability of someone trying to steal it in a legal fashion is low. You are dealing with a risk management issue. I hate to sound cynical or even mildly street savy, but I have had experience with this sort of thing, unhappy experience. (I was the Corporate Treasurer of the Free Software Foundation for some years. Various people tried to put us out of business. We decided to make it easy for companies to decide to give up rather than fight us, so I don't tell names. Except for one, from many years ago, which is well known and became public knowledge without our saying anything. The name is "Steve Jobs". You may have heard of him. He runs Apple. He surrendered. We won.) -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com