From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 03:41:53 -0500
From: forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk
Subject: the licence
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 3d8bd8f6-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19960223084153.jgoe6nobBL8FJG-Y4MmH3A4p3oBk2wSkxldlcvZjAsw@z>

>>Generous I think might be stretching it. Although I meant this as a
>>joke, the agreement *could* be onerous.

the transitive closure clause seems generous to me; i'd not previously
seen anything like it in a licence agreement for commercial software.
indeed, i was astonished when i first read it.

the agreement is written (and this goes beyond discerning `intent', it's in the text) so
as to ensure that anything new you write remains yours, but anything they
wrote doesn't become yours (and even then, there's protection for you
if you have to adhere to an interface that means your code invariably
looks like some of their code elsewhere).

for instance, my Oberon front end is mine, mine, all mine.
if, however, i build a code generator for it by copy & change of either
the C or Alef code generators, i can't claim the latter as mine even if
i tinker with it.  if, however, i write from scratch a whizzy instruction
scheduler to go with it, and add calls to my code to their code, they