what, me worry? Oh yes!

what, me worry? Oh yes!

[Tom]

License arrangements are made to protect and enhance the business
position of the company granting the license and to ACCOMPLISH
certain goals and objectives.

USG made a mess and started off the "UNIX wars" when it introduced
the SVR4 license a decade ago. The sad thing was, management was warned
(by a small but vocal group) that the license was a stinker.
But, management was convinced by the marketing droids who came up
with this evil document that all would be well. This was even after
private communications from major licensees to "smarten up" were
passed along.

What I learned was the following:

(1) Lawyers are wonderful people who protect your position if you
can clearly state it to them. They are not to be blamed in this case.

(2) Management must understand what it's doing with its license.
If the "intent" can't be explained in a few simple easy to
read sentences then you have a problem.

(3) Management must know what its goals and objectives are
in introducing the product and appreciate the ramifications
of the terms and conditions in the  license.
(A very hard thing to do.)

It's easy come up with a bad license, it hard to come up with a good one.

-- 
=================
Users choose DOS and MAC's over UNIX	| Tom Glinos @ U of Toronto Statistics
You are not expected to understand this.| tg@utstat.toronto.edu

what, me worry? Oh yes!

[Berny]

Original attachment posted by Tom Glinos, x4302:
> 
> What I learned was the following:
> 
> (1) Lawyers are wonderful people who protect your position if you
> can clearly state it to them. They are not to be blamed in this case.

There are few individuals in the overall population of 
programmers who can understand the workings of an operating system,
and none of them are lawyers (and if they are, they eat Quiche very badly). 
My experience with AT&T lawyers (mentioning no names) is that they don't 
have a clue what they are trying to protect. They rely solely on 
technical experts to tell them what *they* think should be protected. 

So, in this case, what is said here is correct; you can't blame
the lawyers directly. But, and I say again *but*, the lawyers 
must justify their jobs equiped with little knowledge of what the hell they 
are trying to protect so they instruct the technical bods to go away and 
find something that they *think* should be protected. And this goes on in a 
vicious circle........

The results is a bureaucratic system with a licensing scheme that is almost
impossible to enforce in court -- it's difficult to find a judge with a
computer science degree and it's impossible to find a lawyer who knows
what he is talking about in the same regard (or, in fact, any regard :-)