OT - Closing Off An Open-Source Product

[Bob Kline]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Chris Watson wrote:

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> > Sorry, no matter how noble the GNU folks might be, they can't change the
> > copyright laws without the cooperation of the courts and/or the
> > legislature, and it's not likely they'll be able to enlist the aid of
> > either to defeat the longstanding tenet that "de minimis" copyright
> > claims are not legitimate.  You want to be careful not to mix copyright
> > law with contract law.
> 
> Also I might add, there is one known case where you are wrong on this. And
> that is the BSD or FreeBSD License. These two licenses allow the GPL to be
> placed in addition to the BSDL/FBSDL. Nothing in said licenses prevent it.
> So while for most cases youre statement is true in the case of GPL'ing BSD
> code it is not. Unfortunately :-/

What?  How does anything you wrote support the assertion that changing a
single letter of a work in the public domain entitles you to a
legitimate copyright claim in the derived work?

-- 
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline at rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com