> > What if you are not trying to flame :-) I was deliberately avoiding
> > specifics and the whole thrust of the line of thought was simply an
> > observation about the biological similarities of (some) OpenSource
> > licenses and virus's..
>
> However, unlike biological viruses, it's YOUR decision if you want to
> catch this virus.
>
> If you don't like the license terms of the code, just don't use it.
>
> Bill

Unfortunately there are enough similarities between the GPL and a virus
that this analogy keeps coming up.

Example:

One problem is that large commercial programs are made by large teams
of programmers. Some of these programmers may not understand the problems
they may cause by including GPL'ed code. The companies legal department
probably doesn't look through the source code.

Now this company has released a commercial program that *should* have been
GPL'ed.

What should happen if they are "caught"?

I would say that if the original GPL'ed code is a small part, that the
company should just rewrite it. There are other opinions on this. I'm
a moderate. The GPL was written by somebedy much less moderate (great
piece of work, however).
--
D. Jay Newman           !
jay@sprucegrove.com     ! Xander: Giles, don't make cave-slayer unhappy.
http://enerd.ws/robots/ !

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