Legal traps in open source

Sam Couter sam at couter.dropbear.id.au
Wed Oct 30 11:20:29 EST 2002


Matthew Hawkins <matt at mh.dropbear.id.au> wrote:
> "Not understanding the implications of what they are doing, they could
> incorporate it into a program for their employer, which may then be
> distributed for a price and they could be in breach of the GPL."
> (there's two issues here; one is that there's obviously no proper
> software development procedures being followed at such a company hence
> they deserve any legal trouble they get into; two is that GPL'd software
> is able to be charged for, whether in initial sale or in redistribution)

You're forgetting the *most* important point: Who expects to be able to
cut 'n paste code from somewhere else without complying with the licence
on that code? It doesn't matter if the licence is GPL or not, you can't
just copy anything you want.

This is pure FUD.

I'm sure that if I got access to Microsoft's source code through their
Shared Source program (or any other means) and copied it into a product
of mine, the results would be far worse than if I'd copied GPL'ed code.
-- 
Sam "Eddie" Couter  |  mailto:sam at couter.dropbear.id.au
Debian Developer    |  mailto:eddie at debian.org
                    |  jabber:sam at jabber.topic.com.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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