There'a a legal doctrine whose name I can remember (I'm too young for senior moments!) ... "inevitable contamination" or something
It is call "inevitable disclosure" I think.
like that. The basic idea is that someone who had been exposed to Microsoft source code and then worked on Wine within a given period of time would be assumed to have used knowledge gained from that exposure. I believe that the burden would be on that person or the Wine project to show the opposite.
For that person, perhaps. IIRC the doctrine of "inevitable disclosure" it on a little shaky ground as it is eventhough some Judges have use it so far, it is NOT 100% established doctrine.
As far as the Wine project is concerned, you will have to stretch the doctrine pretty far since the Wine project can't possibly know what a patch submittor has done before unless he tells us himself.
This is what I'm really worried about. Some well-meaning hacker takes "Advanced Operating System Theory" at a Microsoft-beholden university and then makes a contribution to Wine. (The more I think about it, I'm surprised Microsoft isn't trying harder to expose more people to their code and license.)
Sure, we probaly need to make others more aware of that, but that primarily concerns them, not us.
Fair use? We don't need stinking fair use! After all, that might interfere with corporate earnings reports. (I'm too old to become a communist!)
And favouring fair use have what to do with communism?
It is entirely possible to have a capitalistic society without Intellectuall Property (IP) at all or with very weak IP (strong fair use).
That said, nothing I can see appears to restrict someone
who has accepted
their license from answering explicit questions we might
have, so long as
they are not doing so for hire (thus 'commercially'), and
so long as they
don't distribute source code. A fair bit of useful
knowledge might be
gained in that way, albeit slowly.
Now you're really scaring me!
Why? Any violation is primarily their problem and extending derived work over a verbal description is stretching far to far. This has already been established by actual court case.
Patrik Stridvall wrote:
Fair use? We don't need stinking fair use! After all, that might interfere with corporate earnings reports. (I'm too old to become a communist!)
And favouring fair use have what to do with communism?
I was just joking about my growing disillusionment with the U.S. legal system.
-
Ian Pilcher -
Patrik Stridvall