On Dec 18, 2005, at 3:06 PM, Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
>
>> You can do more than look and learn: you can modify and keep for
>> yourself, or modify and redistribute your modifications.
>
> Only if the GPL is acceptable for you. If it isn't, look and learn is
> pretty much all you can do :)
>
Serious companies find that they can't even do that, as there's a chance
that their minds will become "contaminated" by something they've seen,
causing the software they write that was supposed to be proprietary to
suddenly fall under GPL.  For instance, I know that the compiler writers
at intel are not allowed to get any where NEAR gcc...  I don't know if
the gnu people would actually go so far as to go after such cases, but
it's definitely something corporate lawyers worry about...

The most virus-like aspect of gpl/etc is the way it can suddenly cause
in unexpected results.  For instance, we just said that LGPL only leaves
applications proprietary if libraries are dynamically linked.  That's
swell for windows and linux, but none of my embedded systems have a
facility for doing dynamically linked libraries.  Does that mean that
everything I write with avrgcc that uses the provided C libraries 
(perhaps
even the internal libraries that do multi-byte math or floating point)
should be open source?  Ewww!

BillW
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