Copyright (Left)

[Nick Temple]

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 2/16/2002 at 12:04 PM Gerhard W. Gruber wrote:

>Hetz Ben-Hamo wrote:
[snip]
>> 1+2+3+4=10
>> 
>> Then my code will look like:
>> 
>> 5+5=10
>> 
>> So the code is different, but it does same thing, and I still keep my
>> code closed...
>> 
>> Who's loosing here? CodeWeavers. I used their code and no one got
>> nothing out of this. Nada. Zilch. Zero. All their investment on that
>> DLL implementation went down, they'll have hard time to re-cap this
>> investment.
>
>That's stealing. Just because it is easier then stealing an expensive
>car doesn't mean that it is less illegal. And if somebody makes that
>public your company is quite in trouble. The open source mind is also
>based on trust and on the believe that everybody will gain in the end.
>After all you also incorporate and use the things others may have payed
>for on the same principle and could have kept for themself. If everybody
>is stealing only then this is the death of OS.

Unethical, maybe, but isn't that what WINE is essentially doing,
without looking at the code, though?  Illegal, definately not.  Copyrigt
only protects the expression of the idea, not the idea itself.  Let's not
start on patents, though :->