"Thufir Hawat" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
On Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:13:42 -0500, amicus_curious wrote:
The companies misappropriating GPL software are thus causing a lot of
time and effort to be expended. If they respected the copyrights of
software authors, all of this discussion would be unnecesary.
Or if the authors weren't such egomaniacs, they could just ignore the
situation and be happy that someone else thought enough of their
creation to use it themselves.
You're advocating plagiarizing? Never mind the GPL for the moment.
I don't think so. Do you know the meaning of the term? If I were to pooch
something and go around claiming that it was my own work, then that would be
plagiarism, but if I just use it and don't bother with advertising where it
came from, that is not plagiarism.
I think that it is very difficult to determine just where artistic work
begins and simple ideas leave off in software programs. Certainly a
construction such as
foreach( Object obj in Objects)
{
// do something with obj
code...
}
is a common way to loop through a collection of things. It conveys the idea
that we want to consider each element of a collection. If that expression
happens to appear in a GPL protected source module, so what? It can still
be copied without any regard to the GPL.
The vast majority of code is that plain and really only serves to express
the idea behind the operation in the restricted choice of a particular
program language syntax. Remember, that the idea behind the work cannot be
copyrighted although it might be the subject of a patent and certainly could
be the subject of a trade secret.
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