Re: tlug: RMS and Amazon...

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:

> "Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com> wrote,
> 
> > On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
> > > > Have you done any on the stuff you've written,
> > > > Mr. Professional Programmer Scott, Sir?  If not, your
> > > > professional ethics are, ah, questionable.  Can't afford
> > > > it?  Tough---what happens if an infringement is proved,
> > > > and some of your customers have to take down their systems
> > > > or pay extortionary license fees?
> > > 
> > > I am actually always a bit surprised when a skilled software
> > > engineer is ignorant of the problem, while at the some time
> > > is becomes more difficult with each day to implement any
> > > kind of sizeable software without infringing on some patent.
> > 
> > well, some of us software types don't like reading patent law... we leave
> > that to managers.  That would be true for me and people like me who are
> > the kind that will probably never be in business for ourselves :)
> 
> Sorry, but you just don't get it.  This is not about reading
> patent law, neither is it entirely about reading the patents
> themselves.  To be honest, I guess, you don't really
> understand the difference between patent and copyright
> protection.  

I'm starting to see here that you are right, I did confuse the two, hence
my original post.  Actually, I saw this a couple of days ago, but this
thread has become so lively and gotten a lot of good discussion going, so
I thought I'd just keep my mouth shut[1] and let the thread progress.

[1] Yeah, I should have done that to begin with.  Someday I will learn
this.  But for now, it's too much fun to see how people will react...
besides, you know you like it :)

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone, CCNA <sstone@example.com>
UNIX Systems and Network Engineer
Taos - The SysAdmin Company 

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