On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 19:36, Bill Moseley wrote: --snip > I assume most here agree it's absurd to think you can't have "free" > software? Isn't that what SCO is now claiming, that US copyright law > "supercedes(sic) the GPL" -- so you can't write "free" software?
Welcome to the wonderful world of 'intellectual property' in the US. As an example here: My previous employer had a contract provision that stated that any and all code I write while employed there was owned by the corporation. One of the things I wrote there was a library for Visual Basic (I couldn't help it! They made me do it! May RMS have mercy on my soul! :) which would parse a text box for numbers and arithmetic symbols and perform the appropriate calculations on it. No one else so much as contributed a comment to this code other than myself. Now, if for some reason, unfathomable as it may seem, I choose to write a program in VB again and I use the same code that I used in the library, and then release the program under the GPL, I would be in violation of my previous employer's intellectual property rights and would, therefore, risk making my entire program 'illegal'. Theoretically, if I re-implemented that library in say, Perl, I still MIGHT be in violation. (Thankfully it was all a dirty hack so I don't have to worry about ever writing something that bad again. :) IANAL, but this is how I've understood the law and, in particular, how my former employer would most certainly interpret it. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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