On Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:16:25 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Ken Tilton wrote: >> Kenny happened to solve the traveling >> salesman problem and protein-folding and passed the fricking Turing test >> by using add-42 wherever he needed 42 added to a number, and RMS wants >> credit and ownership and control of it all. > >That might be what RMS wants (or not, I've never asked him), but it >doesn't follow from the licence. What follows from the licence is that >you have to distribute the derived work as GPL _or not at all_. I >practice - if not in marketing terms - that's no more a land grab than a >proprietary licence saying "you can't use this to add your own numbers >to 42 at all and if you do we'll eat your brains". > >The other consideration is that, and notwitshtanding any text to the >contrary in the GPL, it's not actually up to the copyright holder to >define what "derived work" means: it's for the court to decide that. >Now, I don't want to imply that courts are rational animals that can be >relied on to understand all the issues in technical cases like this (ha, >I slay myself) but really, if there's a reasonable concern that an >implementation of the major advances in computer science you describe >are legally derivative of someone's function that adds 42 to its >argument, your legal system is fucked. Redo from start.
Our [US] legal system is fucked ... more so with respect to patents, but copyrights aren't far behind. The US Congress just revisited patent law to make it less of a land grab - we'll have to wait and see how the USPTO interprets the new rules - but copyright law has been trending the other way (more grabbing) for a couple of decades now. George -- for email reply remove "/" from address -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
