[Glastonbury] My CUPS floweth not ...

[Ian Dickinson]

Kelvin McNulty <kelvin24 at gcircle.co.uk> wrote: 
> Thanks for clarifying this, Ian and Damon.
No problem.  Who says I'm easily distracted from
getting on with some work ... :-)

> I have felt bothered by the SCO/IBM dispute about
> proprietory code being  included in Linux, 
Don't be.  Lots of the core of various flavours of
Unix contain copyrighted code (going back to
University of Berkeley or AT&T or whoever), but that
stuff has been  either properly licensed or replaced
by clean-room versions.  The thing with SCO is a
complete red-herring, imho.  I think SCO expected that
IBM would either simply settle out-of-court, or buy
out the company and shut them down.  Instead, IBM
called their bluff.  So far, despite lots of bluster
and millions of $$ in legal fees, SCO haven't actually
identified any misappropriated intellectual property.
I can only imagine that Darl McBride has a tenuous
grasp on reality the way he's fighting this battle.

> and am also becoming aware of
> Debian's status as what I 
> believe is the only genuinely 100 percent royalty
> free Linux distribution. It 
> does seem from your messages that CUPS does not
> compromise that status, 
> whereas something like StarOffice would, I imagine,
> if it was included as 
> part of the distribution. Though OpenOffice.org
> would not. StarOffice is 
> included as part of the SuSE distribution that I
> currently use, though I don't have it installed. 
I've never used StarOffice so I don't know anything
about it.  But if it's included on the install disks
for an otherwise free Linix distro I can't imagine
that there's anything illegal or immoral about
installing it.  It depends entirely on what the
license terms say.
 
> So copying the discs and passing them on would 
> infringe copyright somewhere...
Maybe, maybe not.  Most likely not.  Thing is, when
you install a piece of software and it says "blah blah
blah click here if you accept these terms", and, like
99.99% of the populace you skip over it and click
there to accept, that's the thing that determines what
you can and can't copy.  If you care about it, read
the license before you accept. If you basically trust
in the intrinsic goodness of your fellow
man^wperson^wcarbon-based lifeform, then go ahead,
click there to accept, and sleep easy at night.

Right. Enough of that. Back to work!
Ian



	
	
		
___________________________________________________________ 
ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com