On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 3:20 AM, Adam Skutt <ask...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Jan 20, 11:51 pm, Albert van der Horst <alb...@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> > wrote: >> This is what some people want you to believe. Arm twisting by >> GPL-ers when you borrow their ideas? That is really unheard of. > > Doesn't matter, you're still legally liable if your work is found to > be derivative and lacking a fair use defense. It's not borrowing > "ideas" that's problematic, it's proving that's all you did. For > those of us with legal departments, we have no choice: if they don't > believe we can prove our case, we're not using the code, period. The > risk simply isn't worth it.
Many legal departments have an overblown sense of risk, I'm afraid. And I suppose that's somewhat natural, as it's mostly the legal people who are putting their necks on the line over such issues - though I wouldn't be surprised to see a disciplinary action or even firing of a techie over same. I worked at DATAllegro when it was acquired by Microsoft. The DATAllegro product had significant portions that were opensource code; Microsoft, of course, decided that they needed to "quarantine" (meaning "eliminate", in a weird, half-way sense) the opensource portions. Why did Microsoft do this? Why knowingly go through with the purchase of a product that had large opensource parts? Why was what they did considered "enough" as part of a complex due diligence process, to satisfy even Microsoft's copyright-extensionist lawyers? When I say "copyright extensionist", I mean: 1) Their legal department once told me that a small python module could not just be rewritten under a different license, legally, because a small module could not be made different enough to avoid issues. 2) Their onboarding process literally said "don't look at example code in programming books - it entails a legal risk for the company." What made them think DATAllegro's purchase price was still worth it, despite this perspective on copyright? I don't know; I have no first-hand knowledge of that process, though ironically I did help quarantine the "offending" code. But obviously Microsoft management, their board and their lawyers felt it was worth the risk at the price. I know it had something to do with contracting out to a 3rd party company to assess the risk and ascertain what portions "required" excising. Here's one such company: http://www.blackducksoftware.com/black-duck-suite A former coworker (not of Microsoft) suggested they were the only company in this business. I believe Black Duck has software that automatically detects opensource code in a body of work. IOW, it's quite possible to demonstrate that something isn't a derivative work, enough so to make even Microsoft's lawyers happy, given adequate funding for the purpose. So yeah, sometimes a programmer peeking at opensource code might be more of a risk (== expense) than a closed-source company is willing to take, but so might studying a book intended to help you learn programming. And how many programmers haven't studied a programming book at some time in their life? My intuition tells me (I'm not going into details - that feels too dangerous to me personally) that part of the issue Microsoft was trying to prevent, wasn't so much a matter of copyright safety, as trying to avoid being called hypocritical; they've made a lot of noise about how dangerous opensource is. If they then turn around and distribute opensource code artifacts as part of a Microsoft product, then they'll probably eventually get beaten up in the tech press yet again over the new matter. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
