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From: ignatz@aicchi.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Surreptitious copyrighting, was Public Domain Yacc
Message-ID: <929@aicchi.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 21-Feb-87 14:05:52 EST
Article-I.D.: aicchi.929
Posted: Sat Feb 21 14:05:52 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Feb-87 01:50:18 EST
References: <210@bacchus.MIT.EDU> <280@slovax.UUCP>
Reply-To: ignatz@aicchi.UUCP (Ihnat)
Organization: Analysts International Corp; Chicago Branch
Lines: 21

I'd just like to point out that, no matter what may be inserted in your
executable from a library or an intermediate processing step such as a
linker, rights of all parties concerned are governed by the signed licensing
agreement.  Most agreements today explicitly allow the end-user to distribute
products incorporating library routines with no royalties due the copyright
holder of the library itself; in fact, I will avoid either using, or
recommending to clients that they use, any development package that still
has such restrictions.  (In fact, most companies do prefer to avoid such
complications in packages they intend to market, anyway.)

I can understand their desire to tag their code with copyright information;
and the courts have ruled that it must be readable.  But it does gripe
me that I'm paying a phenomenal memory and/or disk storage cost for such
legal protection.  Do a 'strings', or 'what', sometime on a System V
library and the programs in /bin and /usr/bin, to see just how much you're
giving of your system to their copyright protection...
-- 
	Dave Ihnat
	Analysts International Corporation
	(312) 882-4673
	ihnp4!aicchi!ignatz || ihnp4!homebru!ignatz