On Fri, Dec 29, 2000 at 08:44:52PM +0200, Stanislav Malyshev a.k.a Frodo wrote:
> NH>> What kind of judge is going to make a decision against a company
> NH>> when in a 100,000 line code, 50 lines "somehow distantly
> NH>> resemble" code from a GPLed program? If the developer only looks
> NH>> at the code, that's what going to happen - he won't suddenly
> NH>> have 10,000 lines identical to a GPL program. If he does have
> NH>> such 10,000 lines, it means he copied them, not just looked.
>
> There's such concept as "negative knowledge". Like, you look in other's
> code and see comment "I'm doing 'foo' because we tried 'bar' and 'baz' and
> this doesn't work". Voila - you gained knowledge that saved you thousands
> workhours. Even if you don't copy any of the code, still this code
> influenced your code, thus making it kind of derived work. This doesn't
> mean that somebody can _successfully_ sue you on this, but chances that
> you can be just sued on this basis are good enough so that most companies
> don't want the trouble. That's only one example of concepts that can be
> applied given there's a lawyer who wants to make money on it.
The "Negatice Knowledge" precendent, to grossly understate my opinion
here, was thought in malice, argued in lies, accepted in ignorance and
maintained by extortion.
And since it has such broad, overreaching effects, it can be used for
almost anything, regardless of the licnese of the software. For
example, BSD could sue because their ideas were used somewhere yet
they were given no credits in advertisemenets like the copyright
license demands.
> Why I am telling this - because for a serious company even a possibility
> of lawsuit is often frightening enough to avid the trouble of touching GPl
> code. Given the publicity that each "GPL violation" case receives, you
> better avoid this trouble even if you know you'd win the suit for sure.
No GPL code or BSD code would ever sue over such a thing. If even they
had, they would have much less resources than either of the two
companies mentioned (I think they were Microsoft and Novell?). These
companies are afraid because a) the precedence is ridiculous, and b)
they expect others to do what they would in their shoes.
- Adi Stav
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