APL license - What about the enforced logos?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John Cowan (cowan at ccil.org):

> The text we see is said to have been "published" to a mailing list longer
> publicly available, despite the claim on the news page.  Nothing is
> said of who published it, and there is no evidence one way or the other
> how the text got to the CentOS team.  What we read may very well be a
> transcription of an ordinary letter sent to CentOS.

If I'd been speaking of CentOS, instead of a strictly hypothetical
imaginary project, I might have pointed to that news page.  In which
case, it reads like an e-mail citation to me (plus I had a few
conversations with people at the time), but your gloss could be right.

Anyway, what's important is the lessons to be drawn from various
scenarios that _can_ and do occur.


> Truth, poor girl, was nobody's daughter,
> She took off her clothes and jumped into the water.

Very good.  Have you ever considered compiling a page of zingers about
"[Language] is essentially..."?  (Yes, I'm a fan of your page.)


> Plaintiffs, indeed, can often get lawyers who work on a contingency basis,
> at least in the United States.  Defendants are generally not so fortunate.

In the instant case -- so to speak -- Mom didn't have to pay the kindly
gentleman in the nice Palo Alto office very much, as she ended up doing
a lot of the substantive research, and $DEFENDANT_FIRM seems to have
contented itself with filing delaying motions for six years.  You'd
almost think they were afraid of angry widows of deceased airline
captains.

(I personally don't think the six years of IRS compliance audits were a
total coincidence, and I _know_ the private detectives on our doorstep
about two days after the death, threatening my mother if she dared to
sue, were not doing it freelance, but I don't care to elaborate.)

In any event, the larger point is that a threat letter is nothing like a
lawsuit, and that plaintiffs themselves often run huge risks, e.g., the 
incredibly damaging truth in $DEFENDANT_FIRM's case about the known
manufacturing flaws in its jet aircraft that also threatened the lives of
many other people, not just those wrongfully killed in that one incident
litigated over.

Discovery is quite the thing, indeed.