[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 11:54 AM 11/17/1999 -0600, I personally witnessed Greg Miller jumping up
to say:
>
>That's why I never release
>anything as GPL--it smells too much like a legal trap designed to make
>it look like generosity when it isn't. LGPL and MPL aren't so bad,
>although I don't use them myself.

I find that the major problem with the GPL is that it "infects" other
programs. I'm also concerned about looking too much at such projects,
because if I get an idea from some project released under the GPL it could
technically be considered derivative. Therefore, I have to GPL it, or I'm
an "enemy" of the always zealous, often militant, and sometimes completely
irrational open source community. 

This is one of the many reasons I have to hate intellectual property; if
I've looked at games X and Y based on game Z which all use select() loops
very similar to mine... how exactly do I prove that I didn't just copy
theirs and make some minor changes? How many ways can you write a select()
loop, for God's sake? One of them is the "right" solution. Intellectual
property assumes guilt based on opportunity; if I have seen the source to
codebase X, then I have been effectively barred from using whatever that
codebase does without providing the appearance that I stole it from them...
even if I never looked at that part of the code. If my implementation is
close enough to theirs, then I could be considered as having plagiarised
their code, even when the implementation in question is the OBVIOUS
solution to the problem! 

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
| 774577496C6C6E457645727355626D4974H       -=CABAL::3146=- 



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