Re: AdaCore ... the Next SCO?

["Hyman Rosen" <hyman.rosen@gmail.com>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> The reasons why the headers have no legal force
...
> I think that AdaCore could successfully convince a
> court that they are indeed the copyright holder.

The natural mistake people here (and ACT as well) are making is to
assume that law works like computers. For example, you are recommending
technological solutions to ward off "spoofing attacks" on the license
and copyright of programs.

That's not how things work. In law, especially in license and contract
disputes, the assumption is that everyone is honest and that things
mean what they say. People wind up in court over disputes in meaning
and interpretation. Deliberate dishonesty and fraud is a much rarer
thing. Furthermore, law accomodates itself to the way things are.
Should a licensing dispute about Ada generic packages wind up in court,
it will be demonstrated that there are many open source libraries
available on the internet, and that it's routine to download them and
aggregate them under the terms of the licenses they contain in their
headers and associated license files. It will also be demonstrated that
for many of the libraries that ACT supplies and claims are distributed
only under the GPL, there are either identical or ancestral versions
available elsewhere with the extra exemption. The onus will be on ACT
to explain why, if they wished to change the license terms, they did
not follow normal practice and indicate the changed terms in the files
they distribute. The answer is going to be laziness or attempted
entrapment, and neither will sit well with the court.

Dewar's comments are those of a cautious (Ada!) programmer - he says
that since you have no way of knowing who might have altered the
headers of the files, you cannot trust them and so they are irrelevant,
and therefore they should be ignored, regardless of what they say. A
lawyer would laugh at this. A lawyer's assumption would be that things
must mean what they say and say what they mean. Regardless of whether
someone down the road might fraudulently alter the license of a file,
it is the responsibility of the distributors to make sure that the
license terms are given clearly and unambiguously if they intend to
later enforce their ownership rights. You've all seen the automatic
disclaimers that company lawyers attach to outgoing e-mails, the
warning labels on possibly dangerous products, and so on. Do you really
think that a lawyer would sanction sending out files that contain
deliberate misstatements of their licensing terms? It's laughable.