[ On Tuesday, September 14, 1999 at 11:57:43 (-0400), der Mouse wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: what happened to the lm75(?) driver?
>
> Bingo.  As I said in another message, roughly, "ask me for something
> and I'll (probably) cooperate; try to force me and I'll push back".

Yes, I realize there's an almost natural tendency to react when you're
told you must do something even if you'd have been more than happy to do
it on your own accord.  This is especially true for people who have a
tendency to reject or otherwise dislike authority, such as indeed to
some extent myself!

However I've slowly learned that writing legally binding contracts, and
otherwise making good use of the law (eg. using copyrights and
trademarks and so on) to clarify everyone's responsibilities is a good
thing.  Indeed in the business I'm in it's often a very bad idea to rely
solely on verbal agreements even when made between the best of friends!

> > then then I have a problem because it's not really you that I'm
> > worried about -- it's the guys one step removed along the way.
> 
> Um, I don't quite understand.  How is this a problem for *you*?

If you create a derivative work from my code (i.e. not just include my
code verbatim in your own collective work) then it's a lot easier for
the next guy along the food chain to skirt his responsibilities under
the copyright law to me (i.e. the owner of the original base work).
Requiring you to maintain an exact copy of my original copyright on the
resulting derivative (and possibly including your own copyright along
with it if you've made a significant change) makes it much more
difficult for a third party to accidentally or otherwise violate the
terms of my original copyright (presuming of course that you've also
made the derivative freely available or have otherwise licensed it to
some third party copyright user).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>