Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. & Microsoft coming to Linux

[Bill Baxter]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 7:09 AM, Steven Schveighoffer
<schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:03:02 -0400, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Steven Schveighoffer
>> <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:00:02 -0400, Yigal Chripun <yigal100 at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> people in the US sued MacDonald's because their coffee was hot (and they
>>>> even won the case!). other people sued a company since their peanuts
>>>> contains nuts.
>>>
>>> [...]
>>> Other examples of lawsuits are definitely frivolous.  If that peanut case
>>> is
>>> true, I'd use that one instead (it sounds too ridiculous to be true, I'd
>>> appreciate a citation).
>>
>> Peanuts aren't actually nuts, you know.  They're legumes.  So there
>> might well be a case where the lable said "100% peanuts" and someone
>> allergic to nuts ate up, knowing that peanuts aren't in fact nuts.
>
> If someone was allergic to nuts, and they are going around eating peanuts
> because technically they aren't nuts, I'd say they were in fact nuts :)
>
> I'd be hugely hugely surprised if any jury awarded a judgement based on
> that.

Yeh, I'm not saying I think they would, or even should win, just that
the idea of someone suing over peanuts containing nuts is not quite as
ridiculous, self-contradictory, and unbelievable as it first sounds.
In the US at least all kinds of foods that aren't nuts contain the
disclaimer "This product may contain nuts".   I suspect the prevalence
of such labels is because of some lawsuit at some point.

--bb