Unable to buy a copy of BK

Unable to buy a copy of BK

Posted Sep 26, 2004 13:15 UTC (Sun) by mbp (guest, #2737)
In reply to: Unable to buy a copy of BK by lm
Parent article: An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

There is a difference between "reverse engineering" and "poke at". (OK, I am not an IP lawyer...) No proprietary licence allows you to disassemble the binaries; that's fine with me. But no reasonable licence forbids the customer from looking at the files containing their own data, or thinking about the design, or "poking" the program.

I completely defend your free-market right to refuse to sell to whoever you want, and certainly your right to choose a proprietary licence. But I have to say all these shifts in the licence worry me. Just the other day I recommended bk to a business user. Had I known about this I would have thought again. I couldn't recommend storing code in a system whose licence can be denied because you dislike something that one employee said.

My employer competes with IBM products, but are they going to suddenly revoke our Clearcase licence, or refuse to sell a new one? I certainly hope not. I suppose the possibility is a strong argument for using a free system as soon as there is one that's good enough.

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