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The one point consistently being missed is that many open source licenses carry a "taint" with them that causes most commercial companies to avoid them. What do
by BlackFly 11y ago
The one point consistently being missed is that many open source licenses carry a "taint" with them that causes most commercial companies to avoid them. What does it mean to propagate a program? If an employee checks out a personal copy outside of business hours, is that propagation, or modification of the single licensed copy that the business owns? When two employees modify the code simultaneously, who owns the copies? The amount of taint is irrelevant, either one included license taints it or no included license taints it.
Once a bit of copyleft code is modified and included in a binary, the legal question of whether the result is open source is not trivial and certainly open for discussion. That being said, it is certainly the intention of many people releasing the code under copyleft licenses that any modified work be open source. It is completely unfair to project the idea that all people siding with Mr. Aleynikov do so solely due to animosity towards Goldman Sachs.
It is completely circumstantial that he tried to hide the fact that he made a personal copy. It is often best to avoid having a discussion. I try to hide from my parents the fact that my wife and I... well you get the idea.
- tptacek 11y agoDoes this have anything at all to do with the Aleynikov case? A great deal of effort was expended on both sides to establish that he did not merely take "tainted" open source code. Are you considering hypotheticals here, or is this stuff you've actually learned from the facts of the case?