On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 12:57 PM, Philip Semanchuk <phi...@semanchuk.com> wrote: > On Jan 21, 2011, at 3:36 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote: >> 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. > > I carefully avoid GPLed code on our BSD-licensed project not because I need > fear anyone's legal department, but out of respect for the author(s) of the > GPL-ed code. The way I see it, the author of GPL-ed code gives away something > valuable and asks for just one thing in return: respect the license. It > strikes me as very selfish to deny them the one thing they ask for.
That's very considerate, and yet, I think there are multiple senses of the word "avoid" above. If you're avoiding inspecting GPL'd code for ideas, I think if you ask most authors of GPL'd code, they'd be more than happy to allow you to. I've released GPL'd code quite a few times, and personally, I'm flattered when others want to look it over. If you're avoiding cutting and pasting from (or linking against) GPL'd code into something that isn't GPL-licensed, then that's very sensible. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
