On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 01:28:53PM +1000, hartr@redhat.com wrote:
> On 25 Jul, Chirgwin, Richard wrote:
> > Robert writes:
> >
> >>Licences like this are in fact a trap door - once you have gone through
> >>them, you are effectively barred from developing open source software
> >>through the danger of legal action.
> >
> > Robert, I'm not an expert reader of licenses - and I suspect other Linkers
> > may be curious, so could you explain the danger in greater detail?
>
> You don't have to be an expert in licences really, but also please bear
> in mind IANAL! The scenario goes like this...
>
> 1) Assume you are an open source developer, happily coding away on one
> of more open source projects - such as, say for the case of the
> argument, the Linux kernel.
>
> 2) Some company decides that it will allow you to look at some of its
> proprietary source code (ie code that is NOT licenced under an open
> source licence). To look at the code you have to agree to the
> licence provisions which forbid you to reuse/distribute etc the code
> for any purpose. For the sake of the argument, say the code you look
> at is an operating system kernel.
>
> 3) Following this look at the proprietary code, you contiunue hacking
> away on the Linux kernel. Can you guarantee that you are not using
> some technique used in the proprietary code?
>
> The simple answer is that of course you cannot guarantee this - and
> that means that any work you do is potentially tainted - with legal
> implications that are pretty horrendous. This is particularly so if
> you are a company whose business depends on being able to distribute
> the software).
Which sounds much like what happened with AT&T Unix source code
licenses. I'm not sure whether there was any successful prosection,
but people were considered "tainted", making it difficult to work
on (say) BSD code.
rik.
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