On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Michal Wallace <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree, I definitely have better things to do with my time that deal with > licensing issues, but it still needs to get done. :)
Maybe it does. The legal reasoning behind copyrights is a bit dubious, but most legal reasoning is a bit dubious. Law seems to be based on the idea that judges never make mistakes and that it's worth paying people a lot of money to deal with the arguments which result trying to make sense of their decisions. (That's oversimplified, of course - it's really that they never make mistakes based on the facts presented to them, and I could probably spend a few years qualifying any such statement with additional caveats. And the fact is: most of them do a fairly credible job, but that's no guarantee of anything.) I suppose that's better than relying on feeding lots of people with axes as a method of resolving disputes, but it's probably better to leave law to people that get paid for it and then only if it's your money that they are taking. > And actually, since I want to spend as little time as possible dealing with > legal issues, I think it's better to just not use software where my rights > and obligations aren't clearly spelled out. (Or at least, not use it for > anything I plan to share with other people.) That's your right, of course. My impression is that anyone can be sued for anything, and that licenses mean different things to different judges. > For all I know, JDB could have been written by evil patent trolls. There's > no author information, no copyright notice... Even > http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/JDB/Announcement was posted by "anonymous". That said, note that a copyright license is not a patent license. Copyright is protection for "art" (which is to say: glitches and defects that have no useful purpose -- there's an explicit prohibition against copyrighting functional content (but of course different judges will have different ideas of what anything will mean and most cases are resolved on technicalities)), and is based on the concept of irrepairable harm (to the author of the flaws) and the author is protected from such harm for approximately 70 years after having died (longer if the author is declared to be acting on behalf of a fictitious entity who was never alive). Patent is different kind of protection for a form of "science fiction without any plot", and is not covered by copyright license. Also, in general, (a) patents are not known to the authors of software, and (b) patent trolls rely on people not being willing to go to a library to find prior art (which is almost always findable for any patent claim broad enough to matter). The difference is that patent protection is for ideas, and not their expression. Or... something like that. You'd have to spend a lot of time and money to get an opinion from an almost infallible judge to find out what that particular judge would actually decide in any particular case. > (The main page does mention ChrisBurke and OlegKobchenko... But are they > the authors of JDB, or just of that page?) That matches my memory of the authors of the package. I haven't heard from Oleg for years. I wonder where he has gotten to? Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
