On 06/12/2018 00:45, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > So you can see why many organisations are so paranoid about having > licences for every line of code they use. Failure to be fully licenced > could be *incredibly* time-consuming and expensive if they get into a > legal dispute. The only way to win is to avoid getting into a legal > dispute in the first place. > > As for what is "not worth prosecuting", there are no copyright police > who troll the internet looking for copied lines of code. Nobody is going > to be scanning your Github repos looking for infringement (at least not
Sorry, that's not strictly true. I know of at least two large companies who have full time teams whose job is to trawl Github, sourceforge and a few others looking at new checkins for unlicensed use of corporate code. And one of those teams is not even a technical team, they are corporate lawyers... And they do prosecute (or at least threaten to). > But they're not going to open up your Python folder and demand to see > licences for everything or question whether or not you copy code from > Stackoverflow without permission. Again bodies like FAST(*) certainly do that (with police cooperation of course - they need a search warrant). But they have been known to litigate and fines of several thousand pounds have been issued to infringers(?) But FAST is rarely interested in FOSS software its commercial code they worry about. And usually it's unlicensed binary code but they will pursue source code infringements if asked. But having been on the receiving end of a FAST raid its an unnerving experience (even though they didn't find anything). (*)I wasn't sure if FAST are still active because I haven't heard of any big prosecutions for about 10 years but their web site suggests they are still very much around. -- Alan G Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.alan-g.me.uk/ http://www.amazon.com/author/alan_gauld Follow my photo-blog on Flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alangauldphotos _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor