Re: Switching to the OSL License, in a dual way.

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 08:17:33AM -0500, Jesse Pollard wrote:
> On Thursday 24 July 2003 16:57, Larry McVoy wrote:
> [snip
> >
> > In other words, reverse engineering is ok if the product doesn't
> > provide access to your data, we do that already, poof, no reverse
> > engineering allowed.  So it's illegal to reverse engineer BK.
> 
> Nonesense. If the business no longer has the licence to use BK (for
> whatever reason) then it no longer has access to the data. Now to
> get access to the data you must reverse engineer BK...

Oh, I see, you violate our license, your license is revoked, and
now you have the write to reverse engineer BK?  Show me the law which 
says that is true.

BK has a command that will take a BK tree and produce pure SCCS files,
there is even a GNU SCCS clone so tell me again you need to go poking
around in BK?

This whole thread is nuts.  First of all, there is no need to do so other
than to try and piss us off.  Second of all, it's completely unrealistic
to think you can reverse engineer it and keep up with our advancements.

> Even though the data is still ASCII, the interrelationships between the
> parts of the data is still "data". And extracting/viewing that would
> require the reverse enginnering.

And those relationships are available from the command line, using BK 
commands.  In other words, you're just trying to yank my chain.  Give
it a rest or join the rest of the wankers in my procmailrc.  Think about
that, one day you may need something from me and I'll never see your 
request, it will be languishing in /dev/null with the rest of wankers.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm