Re: centericq and MSN support
On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 04:21:40PM +0000, Dylan Thurston wrote:
> On 2003-10-23, M??ns Rullg??rd <mru@kth.se> wrote:
> > Dylan Thurston <dpt@math.harvard.edu> writes:
> >
> >> I believe courts have drawn a legal distinction between products or
> >> code that has a reasonable legal purpose and code that has no such
> >> legal purpose.
> >
> > In the case of MSN, would it be legal to run a private server, using
> > the MSN9 protocol? Or is the protocol patented or copyrighted in some
> > way? If such a server is legal, then a non-authorized client would
> > also have a possible legal use.
>
> That could indeed be the case. I don't know enough about the
> situation to have any further comment; I just wanted to say that the
> situation is not necessarily analogous.
Even if connecting to the MSN9 service requires special permission from the
operator of that service (a "license"), how are we to know whether or not
the individual users of the MSN9 client in centericq have or will receive
permission? That sort of second guessing is not the purpose of this list.
Here, we only look at software licenses and see if they grant us enough
permission to distribute the software while still complying with the DFSG.
--
Brian Ristuccia
brian@ristuccia.com
bristucc@cs.uml.edu
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