On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 01:39:16AM +0100, Lewis Jardine wrote: > Don't forget SAMBA - it's a reverse-engineer of one of the key > intellectual properties of one of the richest, and most sue-happy > companies in the entire world. If Microsoft could sue the SAMBA team > (and therefore Debian) over copyright or patent infringement, surely > they would have done so by now? > > I think it is fair to say that if SAMBA is not considered a risk to > Debian, neither should any other code reverse-engineered for purposes of > compatibility. What may be an issue though is if libfasttrack-gift has > infringed copyright by directly copying code from fastrack, rather than > by black-box reverse engineering. I'd like to agree with you, but the reason M$ does not sue the SAMBA developers may be because they have much, much more to lose. A court precendent against them on the merits would destroy Microsoft as we know it. Sherman Networks may be sufficiently diversified that they feel they can be ornery. How's their stock doing? In any case, my point is that failure to sue is not precedent for anything. It is suggestive at best, but I personally would not go to court with only inductive reasoning on my side if I could help it. -- G. Branden Robinson | It's like I have a shotgun in my Debian GNU/Linux | mouth, I've got my finger on the branden@debian.org | trigger, and I like the taste of http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | the gunmetal. -- Robert Downey, Jr.
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