Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[John Alvord]

On Wed, 19 Dec 2001 22:45:43 -0500, "Dimitrie O. Paun"
<dimi at cs.toronto.edu> wrote:

>On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
>
>> They had a goal and I'm sure a lot of competent people did the best
>> they could be accieve it.
>> 
>> However, you can do the impossible no matter how hard you try.
>
>
>And this is precisely why your entire dissertation about the derived work
>doctrine is competely irrelevant for the current discussion.
>
>Let me explain. People had an idea: the spirit of the LGPL (which I
>defined in earlier emails). A lot of bright and competent people tried to
>formalize it for the current body of laws. They came up with the LGPL. As
>such, allow me to consider the LGPL the best available license which
>formalized the above mentioned spirit.
>
>Now, there are two possibilities. The laws allows one to license code under
>the LGPL spirit or they don't. We don't know. If they do, the LGPL is
>OK. If they don't, no other license would, so there's _no_point_ in
>bitching about the LGPL, because nothing else could do a better job!
>
>In other words, if you're OK with the LGPL spirit, you can not do any
>better than going with the it. Period.
>
>But, I hear you say, 'why change the license if it doesn't give you any
>protection?' Well, this is where your reasoning is flawed, because the
>LGPL gives you quite a bit of protection. And this is because there is at
>least a 50% chance that it is enforceable, and this is _good_enough_ in
>practice. This is trivial to see: the market place is littered with
>unenforceable EULAs, yet they seem to do the job. Why? Because big
>companies will have not desire whatsoever to test these licenses in court,
>since they have to much too loose (remember, big companies = have $$$),
>while small companies can build on a business plan based on such shaky
>grounds, as no one is going to fund such ventures. Add to this the immense
>public pressure, and you have Protection, with a capital P.
>
>And just for shits and giggles, if you think _any_ license will give you
>absolute protection, you are sadly mistaken. And the reason this can not
>happen is rather simple: the laws change.

And some 10 years after formulation of the license there is no case
law and no related statues. I contend there is unlikely to be any due
to the lack of potential monetary damages. The worldwide nature of
most open-source ventures further reduces the chance of anything
definitive happening. It is a largely sociological phenomena.

john alvord