Re: Licensing and copyright

[Ali Akcaagac <aliakc web de>]

On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 22:51 -0800, George wrote:

> If any evil proprietary company ever uses any gdm2 code in any
> product I will do the following steps to remedy the situation:
> 
>  1.0) Laugh very hard while pointing at them.
>  2.0) Wipe off the screen as I've spat my coffee at it while
>       laughing too hard.
>  3.0) Make sure I don't own any of their stock, in case I do, sell
>       it.
>  3.1) I think at this point I think it would also make sense to
>       short their stock.
>  4.0) Get on with my life.

The question here is: Who will laugh harder and point the finger to
whom ? You to them or they to you ? If I'd own a company, I would see
how much I can profit as much as possible from the Open Source and Free
Software movement. At the final end when I made enough money from your
volunteer product then I probably am the only one who laugh here. 

Even this is just an example I for my own see it happening right now. I
do respect the entire Movement from philosophy point of view but I do
see an increasing amount of companies showing up and ripping the hell
out of other peoples work.

Thus my personal own advise is that people should re-think twice before
putting their IP under such a questionable licensing modell. Not to
mention that it's still being misinterpret by a lot of so called experts
(Slashdot is usually full of people who became Lawyer over night). Not
to mention that different countries have a different interpretation of
all this or have a superordinate law for all these things.