On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 07:58:55PM -0500, Al Davis wrote: > On Friday 30 January 2004 04:11 pm, Colin Watson wrote: > > But be very careful about doing that; you may well end up "tainted" > > if you sign source licence agreements, and writing free software > > thereafter could be difficult. > > This is the original basis for the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit. > > Writing any software that is in any way similar thereafter could be > different.
Using this line of reasoning you could argue that no one planning on writing literature for a living should ever read existing copyrighted literature for fear of being tainted. No musician should listen to a copyrighted work. After reading GNU software you are "tainted". I would think that a deep-pocketed entity with source-code products might be a bit fearful these days since they might have to prove that they did not harvest something from the open source community. As the open-source library grows there might well a requirement on copyrighters and patenters to prove they did not steal their ideas from the open. In the future there might be a stigma of "stolen code" attached to closed source products and be rejected for fear of losing the investment through forced elimination as a legal remedy to infringment. This is a rambling thread so I don't feel too bad about sending it down yet another path. It seems that open-source is like gunpowder - it's a powerful force that is going to change society. -- Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]