Andrei's Google Talk

[Brad Roberts]

On Thu, 5 Aug 2010, Leandro Lucarella wrote:

> Walter Bright, el  5 de agosto a las 13:34 me escribiste:
> > Because when I've had the roomful of lawyers do their due diligence
> > on me, saying "I never looked at the source code" is an effective
> > defense against any claims of possible infringement. When I say
> > that, they click their briefcases shut, say "we're done here", and
> > leave.
> 
> That seems a little stupid, there are billions of open source projects,
> and I never hear anyone giving that excuse not to contribute.
> 
> Your argument about having to convince people that a feature have
> merits or the bigger inertia to do changes is a valid one, but that one
> is just bogus.

False comparisons.  Walter commercially licenses DMC which shares a lot of 
code with DMD.  Looking at LLVM and GCC would open him up to legalities 
that are easily avoided by not.  MOST open source contributors aren't in 
that sort of position.

Would Oracle be in a tough spot if someone on their sql engine team 
contributed to the mysql code base (prior to it's being brought into the 
oracle family)?  Absolutely.  Even with it as part of the family, I bet 
good money that maintain a nice tight separation of resources to avoid the 
potential of tainting their commercial baby with gpl issues.

Bogus?  Not even a little.

Later,
Brad