what, me worry? Oh yes!

[Berny Goodheart berny@scoucer.tandem.com.au]

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 :-)