Subject: Re: [lojban] jbofi'e version 0.36 released

From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 19:21:41 -0500 (EST)

>>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 [email-masked]
Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com