On Wed, 19 Dec 2001 22:45:43 -0500, "Dimitrie O. Paun" dimi@cs.toronto.edu wrote:
On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
They had a goal and I'm sure a lot of competent people did the best they could be accieve it.
However, you can do the impossible no matter how hard you try.
And this is precisely why your entire dissertation about the derived work doctrine is competely irrelevant for the current discussion.
Let me explain. People had an idea: the spirit of the LGPL (which I defined in earlier emails). A lot of bright and competent people tried to formalize it for the current body of laws. They came up with the LGPL. As such, allow me to consider the LGPL the best available license which formalized the above mentioned spirit.
Now, there are two possibilities. The laws allows one to license code under the LGPL spirit or they don't. We don't know. If they do, the LGPL is OK. If they don't, no other license would, so there's _no_point_ in bitching about the LGPL, because nothing else could do a better job!
In other words, if you're OK with the LGPL spirit, you can not do any better than going with the it. Period.
But, I hear you say, 'why change the license if it doesn't give you any protection?' Well, this is where your reasoning is flawed, because the LGPL gives you quite a bit of protection. And this is because there is at least a 50% chance that it is enforceable, and this is _good_enough_ in practice. This is trivial to see: the market place is littered with unenforceable EULAs, yet they seem to do the job. Why? Because big companies will have not desire whatsoever to test these licenses in court, since they have to much too loose (remember, big companies = have $$$), while small companies can build on a business plan based on such shaky grounds, as no one is going to fund such ventures. Add to this the immense public pressure, and you have Protection, with a capital P.
And just for shits and giggles, if you think _any_ license will give you absolute protection, you are sadly mistaken. And the reason this can not happen is rather simple: the laws change.
And some 10 years after formulation of the license there is no case law and no related statues. I contend there is unlikely to be any due to the lack of potential monetary damages. The worldwide nature of most open-source ventures further reduces the chance of anything definitive happening. It is a largely sociological phenomena.
john alvord