[Plib-devel] Re: legal matters

[Melchior F. <mf...@us...>]

* Fay John F Contr AAC/WMG -- Friday 08 July 2005 16:34:
> It is indeed a beautiful day today.  If I may misquote a twenty-year-old
> movie [...]

I was actually inspired by this quote:

  I think it's a beautiful day to go to the zoo and feed the ducks.
  To the lions.  -- Brian Kantor

:-)



> I think I will wait for Steve's response on this one.  The "freeglut" file
> status is even more vague because it has had stuff added from the OpenGLUT
> library.  GLUT, by the way, doesn't say anything about other people's
> copyrights on the bitmap fonts.

Well, what GLUT does or does not do, is secondary. I don't really think that
there is an immediate threat. But it's clearly a copyright violation and as
such not exactly desirable. Would we complain about someone else violating
plib's/freeglut's license? Certainly! And I think that *omitting* the
copyright message is one thing, but replacing it by someone else's is almost
criminal. Like taking an arbitrary book, removing all signs of the original
author, and distributing it as if I had written it. I don't like the term
"Intellectual Property", even less "IP theft". But the OSS community does
all the time have to fight against these accusations. In this case there's
nothing to argue, I'm afraid.

m.