[OT?] GPL v3 FUD, was For Approval: MLL (minimal library license)

[Wilson, Andrew]

Nigel H. Tzeng wrote:

> From the perspective of a coder it's odd in the context of a software
license that someone would argue on how something was "intended > to be
read" given that our trade instills a certain affinity for preciseness
in statements because a compiler doesn't care what you 
> intended.  Just what you typed.  Folks seeking to abuse your license
care even less and can apply human intelligence toward trying to >
thwart your intentions.

Nigel, if you've ever written a compiler, you know there is plenty of
room for judgment
on the compiler writer's part in just about programming language.  The
designers
of the language have an intention, but does the compiler really carry it
out?  Is the
compiler required to evaluate expressions in strict left to right order,
or in any order it chooses?
Is the compiler even required to evaluate expressions at all, or can
it be lazy (or even optimize away expressions it thinks are
unreachable).  Side effects.  Concurrency.  Race conditions.  Aliasing.
Operator overloading.
Etc., etc., etc.  Would it were so that programming languages were
really that much more precise than software licensing.  ;-)

Andy Wilson
Intel open source technology center