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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byjellomizer ( 103300 ) writes:
Oddly enough most companies even the Evil Microsoft will much rather fix the problem without having to fight it legally, and resolve the problem civilly. When you pre-poster aggressive towards your opponent they will do the same. And if you are Not for Profit organization and you opponent is a big multi-national company, you are going to be in for a big fight where if you were just to be polite and civil about it chances are you will get your objectives, they will quietly fix their problems and save face. Most of the time these GPL violations are not done deliberately but the GPL is a strict license and for a big company you will have people putting in things that they didn't even realize was wrong. Or worse say some GPL Code was cut as a segment for a help forum and was used from that. So yes they violated the code, they probably didn't mean too, if you are nice to them they will probably fix it. If you go all out and make yourself aggressive they will be aggressive too, and put you in a case even if you win you loose.
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byiYk6 ( 1425255 ) writes:
Don't forget, there might not be a problem in the first place. If you are looking around, and see someone else's GPL code in a proprietary product, make sure you find the original owner and talk to them before you go around shouting at the hill tops how evil the proprietary company is.
It is entirely possible that the code was appropriately licensed by the original owner. Just because something is GPL, does not mean that it can not also be licensed for a specific user, usually for money. Think Quake.
Even if the project itself is not licensed for their use, maybe whoever wrote that part of the project re-licensed their contribution to a proprietary company.
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bytearmeapart ( 674637 ) writes:
I find it hard to believe you can post that just a few hours after the "Microsoft Tries To Censor Bing Vulnerability" story was posted ( http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/11/09/2319233/Microsoft-Tries-To-Censor-Bing-Vulnerability [slashdot.org] ).
IMHO, Microsoft's lawyers (collectively) are faster and better than Microsoft's developers (collectively).
Just from that, I believe your arguments are mostly moot.
Also, Microsoft's legal department and development/maintenance team are two separate entities. Legal will do what it n
byWNight ( 23683 ) writes:
That's all bullshit.
You've got the premise the GPL is a strict license and that it's easy to accidently infringe - as if code just teleports into your project.
It's pretty hard to accidentally infringe. You have to go get someone else's code and stick it in your project. If you don't paste any external code into yours, you're 100% safe!
But all copyrighted source is this way. You can't just release something you didn't write, at least without asking permission for it and appeasing the author. The GPL is far l
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