Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 19:25:36 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org (Arun Sharma), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <200003211925.MAA02448@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0003190415120.14850-100000@theory7.physics.iisc.ernet.in> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at Mar 19, 2000 04:29:39 AM
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> Dunno about lawyers but the GPL nowhere insists that you must > redistribute -- only that if you do so, it must be under the GPL. It is my understanding that IBM bought Whistle instead of Cobalt because of fears of the GPL resulting in dillution of their patent portfolio. > More recently, Hans Reiser makes it clear that he plans to > dual-license ReiserFS in some way, GPL for linux and commercial > licence for commercial vendors who may be interested, I think he > too plans to control the copyrights to all contributions in some > way. I think he is going to have a hard time with this, considering that his code utilizes the USL Delayed Ordered Writes patent, without license. This is like "Lesstif", which used the Motif header files and so on; it is my opinion that if Lesstif ever posed a revenue threat to OSF, that they would be well within their rights to stop it dead. The US 5th Circuit court of appeals has binding case law on the subject of "deep reverse engineering". Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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