On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 01:46:58PM +0300, Richard Braakman wrote: > On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 12:09:49AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > I think it's a very safe bet that the Regents of the University of > > California abandoned the advertising clause because their lawyers > > decided it was untenable.[2] Huge institutions like that don't loosen > > licensing terms out of charity. > > On the other hand, lawyers don't drop clauses just because they are > unenforcible :-) Sadly, you have a point there. The same goes for politicians and laws. > One possibility is that they thought that defending the advertising clause > might weaken their position on another issue. Maybe they want to be able > to argue against a similar clause in someone else's license. Hmm, I wonder if the license change was part of the secret settlement with AT&T? Since the case was settled years previously, though, I guess that's unlikely. (The lawsuit was settled on 1994-02-04[1], and the abandoment of the advertising clause did not happen until 1999-07-02[2].) > Or maybe this license change was an actual case of a huge institution doing > something sensible. It does happen. Okay, *now* you're getting way too optimistic for me. :) [1] http://ftp.openbsd.cz/pub/NetBSD/misc/release/misc/USL-lawsuit [2] ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change -- G. Branden Robinson | You live and learn. Debian GNU/Linux | Or you don't live long. branden@debian.org | -- Robert Heinlein http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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