NH>> What kind of judge is going to make a decision against a company
NH>> when in a 100,000 line code, 50 lines "somehow distantly
NH>> resemble" code from a GPLed program? If the developer only looks
NH>> at the code, that's what going to happen - he won't suddenly
NH>> have 10,000 lines identical to a GPL program. If he does have
NH>> such 10,000 lines, it means he copied them, not just looked.
There's such concept as "negative knowledge". Like, you look in other's
code and see comment "I'm doing 'foo' because we tried 'bar' and 'baz' and
this doesn't work". Voila - you gained knowledge that saved you thousands
workhours. Even if you don't copy any of the code, still this code
influenced your code, thus making it kind of derived work. This doesn't
mean that somebody can _successfully_ sue you on this, but chances that
you can be just sued on this basis are good enough so that most companies
don't want the trouble. That's only one example of concepts that can be
applied given there's a lawyer who wants to make money on it.
Why I am telling this - because for a serious company even a possibility
of lawsuit is often frightening enough to avid the trouble of touching GPl
code. Given the publicity that each "GPL violation" case receives, you
better avoid this trouble even if you know you'd win the suit for sure.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] \/ There shall be counsels taken
Stanislav Malyshev /\ Stronger than Morgul-spells
phone +972-3-9316425 /\ JRRT LotR.
http://sharat.co.il/frodo/ whois:!SM8333
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