[long] Re: Legal traps in open source

[Alex Satrapa]

Damien Elmes wrote:
> Well, peanuts aren't actually nuts, but legumes.

My point precisely.  When you start refining definitions, common 
assumptions fall over.

You might ship your software product, stating in the documentation that 
parameter/value pairs are represented as follows:

    parameter = value

And explicitly state that whitespace either side of the equals sign is 
ignored, but someone is going to get cranky because the space in front 
of the value is actually supposed to be a value, according to him.

To everyone else, the space is in front of the value, therefore is 
obviously whitespace.  To this person, the value is " something", 
including the space but not the quotes.  The INI format just can't cope 
with that - what is assumed or obvious to me is invisible to someone else.

Alex