Alfred M. Szmidt wrote: > > Same thing that stops most people from not stealing things from > > your home: the law, and the repercussions of breaking said law. > > Irrelevant. The corresponding situation here would be if the thief > broke into your house, copied your papers, and then left, and if > the same thief had the right to decide if the police / public could > see his papers at all. > > It is quite relevant. The theif, police and/or public do not decide > that. The judge judge does. There is this thing called a search > warrant you know. >
Which is issued when theft is detectable. Pray tell us how is copying GPL code into code that no one can see, detectable. > Microsoft has the power to circumvent detection (closed source - if > you see it, you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement). So, fear > of law does not come into play here. > > Sure it does. Microsoft doesn't have the means to circumvent > detection, unless they stop distributing binaries. You do not need > the source code to figure out if a program is similar enough, software > is not black magic. Let us say that Microsoft ships a windows version (service pack) that does page writes faster. For starters, this would be hard to detect. Second, there is no probable cause - Microsoft can simply say they made a better mousetrap, to borrow a phrase. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
