For Approval: Open Source Software Alliance License
John Cowan
jcowan at reutershealth.com
Thu Sep 25 21:53:30 UTC 2003
David Presotto scripsit:
> While true, that might be awfully hard to do since the two parts
> will not be explicitly delineated. A few generations down the
> line and heredity becomes pretty fuzzy. The viral/inheritive/
> freedom-fighting nature of the GPL will always scare some companies
> from expressly not doing that when creating proprietary forks.
> They'ld rather go with a version whose ancestry can be
> defined.
Safer to go back to the original BSD-ish code. In the current climate,
it's unlikely that any open-source code once released can be lost forever --
too many archives.
> - finding stolen code in open source a few years
> down the line and getting into a SCO-IBM like battle
The chance of that is nearly nil, IMHO (IANAL, TINLA). Most GPL violations
are innocent and/or ignorant, and get resolved early and quietly, according
to Eben Moglen, who does most of the enforcing, or "enforcing".
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