> NH>> What kind of judge is going to make a decision against a company
> NH>> when in a 100,000 line code, 50 lines "somehow distantly
> NH>> resemble" code from a GPLed program? If the developer only looks
> NH>> at the code, that's what going to happen - he won't suddenly
> NH>> have 10,000 lines identical to a GPL program. If he does have
> NH>> such 10,000 lines, it means he copied them, not just looked.
>
> There's such concept as "negative knowledge". Like, you look in other's
> code and see comment "I'm doing 'foo' because we tried 'bar' and 'baz' and
> this doesn't work". Voila - you gained knowledge that saved you thousands
> workhours. Even if you don't copy any of the code, still this code
> influenced your code, thus making it kind of derived work. Thisdoesn't
> mean that somebody can _successfully_ sue you on this, but chances that
> you can be just sued on this basis are good enough so that most companies
> don't want the trouble. That's only one example of concepts that can be
> applied given there's a lawyer who wants to make money on it.
You don't know much about copyrights, do you?
You can't copyright knowledge. You can't even copyright ideas. You can
only copyright specific expressions. By your definition, every program I
write is a derived work of Turing, Knuth, and all my university
professors.
> Why I am telling this - because for a serious company even a possibility
> of lawsuit is often frightening enough to avid the trouble of touching GPl
> code. Given the publicity that each "GPL violation" case receives, you
> better avoid this trouble even if you know you'd win the suit for sure.
So they also don't allow their programmers to read books about
programming? (unless those books are in the public domain)
What "GPL violation" case got any publicity outside of slashdot, and the
like?
> For GPL, RMS is the copyright law. Since if RMS thinks it's
> violating GPL, you probably will very soon forced to GPL it or pull
> it, if only you don't want to get a load of bad publicity and a
> costy lawsuit.
I think you over estimate the fear of bad publicity. RMS is saying for
15 years that MS is bad because they write and sell proprietary
programs, and yet they seem to do quite well. Why should they be afraid
of RMS saying that they broke the GPL, until a judge agrees with
him? what bad publicity does it give them? (of course you can replace MS
with any other prorietary software company).
Two points you seem to miss:
If I write a program, and release it under the GPL, and later RMS thinks
someone else breaks the GPL by distributing that program in some way,
there is nothing he can do about it, unless I want to do something about
it.
If I take a program of RMS, write a front end, an release it as a
proprietary program, and RMS thinks it's a derived work, and I think it
is not, then a judge decides on copyright law, not RMS.
--
Matan Ziv-Av. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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