Words have meanings (plural)

Words have meanings (plural)

Posted Apr 11, 2007 23:39 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
Parent article: How not to handle a licensing violation

I read through the whole thread. Aside from the personalities involved and certain disorders, there were some definitional misunderstandings.

First among these must be that Marcus, the amateur bcw developer, didn't think that committing file versions to (public) CVS amounted to "distribution". That was the "mistake" that Theo alluded to, over and over, and that Michael, who complained, couldn't see as a simple "mistake" because it happened repeatedly. I.e., Michael saw him distributing copyrighted code over and over, while Marcus didn't think he was distributing at all. Michael thought Theo was claiming the copying itself was the mistake, and objected that it could not have been accidental.

(If OpenBSD used Monotone, or a similar distributed repository, it mightn't have come up, because he would have been checking the code into his local repository.)

Another was when Theo announced that Michael was calling Marcus a thief by saying the copying and distribution couldn't have been a "mistake". Copyright violation isn't thievery. Distributing somebody else's code with the copyright notice filed off is not allowed, but the remedy is just to stop distributing (i.e. take it out of public CVS), and no criminal codes are violated.

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