encforceability of Open Source Licences (Re: (OT) - NOT A Major Blow to Copyleft Theory)

[David A. Temeles, Jr.]

License-discuss may not be the appropriate forum for the discussion
Alexander is raising, but this topic is of significant interest and import
to the open source community and should be discussed vigorously by the
members of the open source community.  I would think that the members of
this list would have more intellectual curiosity in the enforceability of
open source licenses than demonstrated over the past few days in the
responses to Alexander's posts.  

Dave Temeles
Bean, Kinney & Korman, PC

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Poole [mailto:mdpoole at troilus.org] 
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 9:25 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: encforceability of Open Source Licences (Re: (OT) - NOT A Major
Blow to Copyleft Theory)

Tzeng, Nigel H. writes:

>>From: zooko [mailto:zooko at zooko.com]
>
>>I have found Alexander Terekhov's posts very interesting (especially 
>>recently, as he seems to have toned down the ad-hominem and focussed 
>>his rhetoric), because of my abiding interest in Open Source.
> I guess the question is how close to reality is his analysis.  Given that
IANAL
> I haven't a clue but the responses to his posts have been less than
> illuminating.

If Alexander Terekhov's analysis is close to any reality, it is a very
special reality in which he may be the only resident.  I've resisted
the urge to chip in on his various odd legal claims in this thread --
he has shown before that he is willing to argue longer than I am, he
tends to repeat points that were already raised and addressed (perhaps
because he's too busy trolling to bother remembering the thread at
hand), and I'm too busy to research topics like legal arcana that have
nothing to do with my day job -- but in my previous dealings with him,
his claims have been specious: they may appear to be well-backed, but
they have deep, inherent flaws.

His comments in this thread are remarkably similar to things he has
said before in other places.  One less-than-amusing tendency of his is
to make posts that are almost related to the point at hand, but which
usually leave gaps where readers are expected to supply key parts of
his argument (such as how they apply to the case at hand).

As one example of old tricks returning: When Rick Moen suggested that
Terekhov test a theory on downloaded items, I was just waiting until
Terekhov mentioned the Windows XP downloads again.  I'm not sure how
"The rest 14 copies went to Debians" was meant to be parsed, but the
message he linked to does not show that he sent any copies to Debian
users or developers -- quite the opposite (which seems to be an
instance of him leaving those critical gaps for us to fill in).

Michael Poole