*BSD News Article 88708


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From: Timothy Watson <tmwatson@umich.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: GPL
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 1997 21:08:42 -0500
Organization: University of Michigan
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Message-ID: <32FBE02A.2F2C@umich.edu>
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Timothy Watson wrote:
> 
> Holger Veit wrote:
> > has a good chance of being void, namely then if it can be shown - and this
> > is IMHO possible without a difficulty - that it is not common practice to
> > request that developers must release their intellectual property (and it
> > is at least partly an own work for the modified parts) if they use certain
> > *published* work. It is a matter of debating how much parts need to be
> 
> Remember BSD - Lite? AT&T still OWNED the source code, no matter how
> widely it had been *published*, and therefore the use of
> its proprietary code was restricted when it was sold to Novell. You
> could not have ANY of this code in your work that could be shown to
> be the restricted code of AT&T origin. (NOTE the example, it should
> be familiar to anyone who runs BSD).
> -Tim WAtson

And I should say, I saw the follow-up:
That's irrelevent. Just a song-and-dance about the point. The REAL
point is ---

What the heck are you saying when talking about
*published* work? Under what conditions does a company/individual
lose the right to control the redistribution of modified versions
of his/her work.

More examples: IBM BIOS Source Code, Soon-to be released Caldera
OpenDos source

What do you think gives the company that sells the modified source
code the RIGHT to base their work on copyrighted code? - Even if
they did add extensions?

-Tim Watson