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From: les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: [O/T 4 cla] Re: GPL and "free" software
Date: 1999/05/05
Message-ID: <7gr768$kqe$1@Jupiter.mcs.net>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 474606598
References: <7fibd5$jc7$1@news2.tor.accglobal.net>
 <7gnb7u$hlu@www.inetnow.net> <7goi9s$qvq$1@Mercury.mcs.net>
 <7gprnj$pau$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>
Organization: /usr/lib/news/organi[sz]ation
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,gnu.misc.discuss
Date: 1999-05-05T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <7gprnj$pau$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
Robert Dewar  <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com> wrote:
>In article <7goi9s$qvq$1@Mercury.mcs.net>,
>  les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell) wrote:
>
>> There is a rather long tradition of user groups sharing their patches
>> to commercial works.  It is usually encouraged rather than contested
>> as long as the participants all have their own copies of the base
>> code.
>
>This is potentially very misleading, I am aware of a major lawsuit
>where the EXACT point of contention is that such sharing of patches
>was a violation of the license agreement. You cannot generalize
>in this manner.

There are lawsuits over nearly everything.  Is there any court
decision that states that something you write is covered by
someone else's copyright when it contains none of the other
work?  Note that this has nothing to do with license agreements
since you can obtain GPL'd works without agreeing to the license,
unless you are redistributing the GPL'd code this is strictly
a copyright issue.  It might not be in a different situation
where you had agreed to a license that prohibited reverse
engineering or modifications.  How about an approach where you hire
the person who did the modification to make the same modification
for you as your agent for some token sum?  

  Les Mikesell
   les@mcs.com