Re: Copyright from the lcs-projekt!? [dwarf@polaris.net: Re: First cut at testing and validation]

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

[long-ish and largely off topic]

Hi Dwarf,

[ excuse me, while I succumb to the urge to be argumentative for a second.
  If this irritates you unduly, please just ignore it :-)                  ]

OK, so I take your program, and because I don't like code duplication, I patch 
it by removing all the while loops, and replacing them with this:

while read file type
do
  while read name
  do 
    if ! [ $type $name ]
    then
      SUCCESS=FALSE
      echo "Failed to find $name"
    fi 
  done < $file
done <<'EOF'
lcs-sonames  -L
lcs-pkgnames -x
lcs-pgmnames -x
lcs-cnfnames -e
EOF

and post the result back to the list as a suggested improvement.

Would this be a copyright violation ?

Why should we have to worry about this sort of drivel?

I don't think that copyright is the right way to prevent bastardisation of the 
validation program.

It does not, for example, stop me writing this script:

---
  #!/bin/sh
  # Program: validate
  # Options: none 
  #
  # Copyright 1998 Philip Hands all rights reserved
  # This program is distributed under the terms of the GPL  ;-)

  echo This system is LCS compliant. Congratulations!
---

I also think the use of a non-DFSG license, by a Debian developer, when it 
does not actually gain you anything to do so, is a bad example to others, and 
generally poor form.

Would it be so bad to have a licence that said something like:

  This code is distributed under the GPL, with the proviso that if you change
  even one character of any of the files, you must remove every reference to
  ``LCS'' in the code, the documentation and the filenames (except the one in
  this sentence).

The effect is the same (probably ;-) but its DFSG free (probably ;-)

Anyway, I think you're right that the whole discussion has been largely 
pointless, and I'm sorry I got involved.

Cheers, Phil.