Re: Identifying CL Implementations?

On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:04:15 +0000, Mark Carter <me@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Peter Herth wrote:
>
>>
>> Well, if you work in a commercial environment, the little details
>> of the licenses make a *huge* difference. Who would sue a company
>> that violates e.g. the LGPL? Probably not the author, so probably
>> noone - or just a nasty competitor who uses this as means to hurt
>> your company.
>
>A competitor can't sue for breach of copyright. It's a matter purely
>between the copyright holder and the infringer. If the copyright holder
>doesn't want to assert his rights, that's up to him.

You are exactly correct about who the matter is between, but this is the
exact reason why the GNU/FSF encourages authors to assign copyrights to
the GNU/FSF (i.e. so the GNU/FSF can file the infringement law suits).

Follow the money trail. One of Peters' competitors wants to damage his
company. The competitor contacts the GNU/FSF to complain how Peter is
"STEALING" some GPL/LGPL licensed Common Lisp software. The GNU/FSF
looks into it and sure enough Peter is using GPL/LGPL lisp software and
just by using the GLP/LGPL code in his closed source products, Peter is
in a legal gray zone because the way lisp variants actually work is not
properly covered by the licenses.

The GNU/FSF might want to play it safe by investigating further but
since they don't have access to Peters' code, they need to get access to
it through the legal system. So the GNU/FSF asks the author of the
GPL/LGPL code to transfer the copyrights to the organization so they can
proceed with filing lawsuits to do discovery.

Who knows what would happen next? There may or may not be a violation of
the GPL/LGPL in Peters' products, none the less, his competitor has
already done a good job of damaging Peters' company even if Peter did
nothing wrong.

There's also another side to it...

Peter Herth is also correct that the little details of licenses make a
"huge" difference in a commercial environment but not for just the
reason he stated. Let's assume all of the source code used by Microsoft
to create their products was legally declared to be owned by someone
else. What would be the valuation of Microsoft as a company be?

The valuation of Microsoft as a company is based on their ownership of
their source code. If for any reason their ownership is considered
legally questionable (yes, usually via a lawsuit from someone they
ripped off), the valuation of the company is negatively affected.

The primary goal of the GNU is to keep source code available to the
public, so the two GNU licenses (GPL and LGPL) are specifically designed
to enforce the disclosure of source code on any derivative works made
available in binary form. It's a wonderful concept but it doesn't mix
well with the goals of closed source, commercial software vendors.

If Microsoft decided to integrate GPL/LGPL code into their products, it
calls into question their ownership of the result. Who is to say
Microsoft followed all the terms of the GPL/LGPL license perfectly? How
would you know without the expense of highering a very large team of
very talented reverse engineers or somehow getting the access needed to
inspect all of the Microsoft source code and build processes?

Regardless of what the answers are, just the questions alone will
negatively affect the value of the company. -The result is similar to
the previous situation I described; someone will need to pay for at
least investigating it, if not paying the full price of proving it one
way or the other.

--
JCR
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: What is class[] in CLR Profiler?
    ... Thank you Peter. ... > CLRProfiler only outputs this if it's unable to obtain ... > subdirectory in the source code, ... > the documentation is ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.clr)
  • Re: VB error with access Help
    ... I do not know if Peter can help? ... > convert it into assembly language which is more related with low level and ... > I think you may have to contact the original software development engineer ... > or company to see if they have any available source code for the software. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.database.dao)
  • Re: Module doesnt get inserted
    ... I have the source code for both these kernels under /usr/src ... "Peter T. Breuer" wrote in message ... > Your running kernel is irrelevant to the compilation. ... If so compile against that source code. ...
    (comp.os.linux.development.system)
  • Re: C# Resource Lists
    ... Peter wrote: ... > I've been programming in VBfor about 5 years now and have ... > webpage refrences. ... A webpages with some Free C# source code pages ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp)
  • Re: Cube meta-data with ADO.NET
    ... Peter Yang ... Microsoft Online Partner Support ... |> SDK on the middle tier. ... |>>> Will PTS still exist when Yukon comes out? ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.olap)