UUCP & Ethics

[cottrell at nbs-vms.ARPA]

/*
I'm getting pretty damn sick of this righteousness on this network.
Everyone is a sinner. Everyone draws his own lines. Remember the words
`Government {for,by,of} the People'. That means I have some say in it
too. There is all kind of unenforcable illegal malarkey in written
contracts. They're just trying to intimidate you into doing what
they want. Remember, if you have source, you PAID for the RIGHT to
look at it. You don't have the right to copy it & claim it as yours,
but anything you learn is your own experience. What if you had
previously delved into UUCP to fix a bug, & found decided, "wow, this is
really a mess, there's got to be a better way". By then your mind
would be `polluted' with trade secrets, & you would be ethically
bound not to rewrite it. Hogwash. I said there is a happy medium.
I agree that the spirit of the law should be obeyed. I will therefore
agree of my own free will that I will not make money off TPC's (or
anyone elses) code. But if I need cpio on BSD, I will port it. I did,
so sue me. If Lauren is as smart as people say (& I believe so), he is
doing the rest of us a disservice my shooting in the dark. Take a few
peeks at existing code & build on that instead of reinventing the wheel.

	jim		cottrell at nbs
*/