On 6 Sep 2004, skaller wrote:

> > If this becomes important, hire a lawyer.
> 
> Why would you believe a lawyer who can't cite a long
> history of case law (decisions made by judges)?

Because they have knowledge and experience that your average programmer or 
blowhard on the internet doesn't have.  I wouldn't trust the average 
lawyer to write code, and I wouldn't trust the average programmer to write 
a license.

> So .. hehe .. I could take your module and
> copy the mli file and implement the functions and
> then the interface is a derived work but the 
> implementation is not. And in Ocaml I could then
> simply discard the mli file, run ocaml -i
> to derive a new mli file -- and hey presto,
> now the interface isn't a derived work either ..
> even if line for line it is totally identical 
> to the original :)

I'm not 100% sure where the line is drawn here.  Nor am I 100% sure anyone 
else is either.

That "blowhard on the internet" quip includes me- IANAL.  An analogy to 
make things clear: I can, with a few sentences, explain type inference to 
my grandmother.  But there are a heck of a lot of intricies and subtlities 
that will get glossed over in this paragraph introduction- some of them 
not so intricate or subtle.  Exactly how corner cases and gray areas get 
handled can not be deduced from this abstract.

In this case, I am grandma- I've had the five minute abstract thrown at 
me over dinner in casual conversation.

-- 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian

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