Re: Bitkeeper

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 02:08:32PM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
> 	My understanding of the relevant case law in the United States is that
> these types of restrictions are not allowed under copyright law itself.

On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 10:23:30PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> Actually your license is simply irrelevant in most of thre world. You
> aren't allowed to forbid reverse engineering for interoperability.

    "Judge, I want to violate this license on this product that I got
    for free because it's not free enough".

    "Judge, we give it out for free and we also developed technology
    to transfer the data out of our product and into a GPLed product,
    we do that at our expense and even host the competing GPLed repos
    for free and they still want to violate the license"

Who do you think is going to win that one?

Besides, have you considered that it is that license you appear to
dislike so much which provides for the product, the hosting, the free
public machines, the support, all of that?  It's a pile of money and
time and I don't see RMS steppng forward with an open checkbook.

The license means we have a revenue stream.  We use a significant portion
of that revenue stream to help Linux.  If the revenue stream goes away
then so do the services we provide to you for free.  They obviously
have value or you wouldn't be using them.  
-- 
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Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm