> On Aug 28, 2019, at 11:54, Neil Van Dyke <n...@neilvandyke.org> wrote: > > If someone violates (their non-lawyer interpretation of) the Racket license, > in a conspicuous manner like you suggest, would they not expect the SFC to > send them a nastygram -- perhaps if only for the SFC to show that they defend > the copyright, if not for other reasons?
You don’t have any risk of losing a copyright just because you don’t choose to enforce it; you’re thinking of trademark law. If a copyright holder chooses not to pursue legal action against a violator, they may do so, and it does not in any way prevent them pursuing action against them or someone else in the future. That said, your following sentence is absolutely right: it doesn’t matter if the Racket core team chooses not to enforce their copyright if they are not the exclusive copyright holders, and as I have already opined, I believe they are not. Any copyright holder may pursue legal action against violations of their copyright if they so choose, whether they are members of the Racket core team, the SFC, or independent Racket contributors. On the other hand, if I were Joel, I probably wouldn’t be losing sleep over the potentiality of a Racket contributor taking me to court over my infringement. As I said previously, I don’t know how much Racket code is still exclusively licensed under the LGPL, but I’d bet the large majority is now licensed under the MIT and Apache licenses as well. Unless Joel starts making millions off his project and some contributors come out of the woodwork to try and get a piece of that action, I doubt his assessment is incorrect… and if that happens, well, he can probably afford to pay them enough to negotiate a license with them. Still, a calculated risk is still a risk. YMMV, IANAL, and obviously this is not qualified legal advice. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/74B3531F-9A18-4F01-9A30-B5F5DB627EF8%40gmail.com.