Re: Honest does not pay here ...

Adam J. Richter
2003-01-12T09:18:50Z

Paul Jakma writes:
>And frankly, courts in most parts of the world will look at community
>practice as a (slightly weaker than a court case) precedent [...]

Since you imply that you are familiar with "courts in most
parts of the world", I'd be interested if you could identify, and,
ideally, quote the court decisions or laws that define this "community
practice as a (slightly weaker than court case) precedent" doctrine,
presumably some kind of extension of stare decisis that I haven't
heard of before.

Apparently, findlaw hasn't heard of it either. "community
practice" only turned up one clearly inapplicable hit (in quotation
marks so as not to turn up every page containing the words "community"
and "practices") about "studies performed in community practice
settings involving thousands of patients." In comparison,
"contributory infringement" turned up 75 hits, 129 hits for "stare
decisis", 246 hits for "court precedent." I don't see anything
relevant from poking around google, but there were a lot of hits.

Anyhow, as far as I can tell, no copyright owner other than
Linus has given permission to use their code with proprietary modules.
If you want to give people permission to use _your_ code under terms
essentially identical to the LGPL (since you can always write wrapper
functions) then feel free to state that you are granting that
permission, or, perhaps more simply, LGPL your contributions.

I'm not a lawyer. This is not intended as legal advice.

Also, if you do not answer my question clearly and honestly or
I otherwise think you've danced around it, then I may not be able to
prioritize any more time to you respond further. That does not imply
agreement.

Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 575 Oroville Road
adam@yggdrasil.com \ / Milpitas, California 95035
+1 408 309-6081 | g g d r a s i l United States of America
"Free Software For The Rest Of Us."