[License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development

[Eben Moglen]

You seem determined to take offense, Mr Cowan.  

In the first place, I think you might have missed the point of the
Shakespeare quotation preceding the remark you object to.  I didn't
compare Mr Rosen to a 1L.  I wrote that the unavailability of specific
performance in contract is 1L material.  I made no reference to Rosen.
That was a factual statement for the benefit of non-US lawyers and lay
readers.  Mr Rosen took offense by inferring a comparison that was not
implied.

In reply I quoted from Sonnet 111, and said that since I work with law
students all the time, if I *had* compared him to one it would hardly
have been an accident: I compare lawyers to the students they were all
the time.  I explained that to you, and you have made it somehow a
further ground for offense, demanding a show of contrition that makes
no sense whatever.

In the second place, I wasn't proposing to shut you up.  The only
person I can shut up is myself.  I was bidding farewell to the
conversation, before others began to find it tedious.  Now, through no
fault of mine, they will in addition begin to find it acrimonious.
All the more reason for the silence I proposed.

Eben