If you don't want your bike or car to be stolen, that's a legal issue. It's the law in fact. Yet there are still locks - a technical solution. And if your bike gets stolen, or your things get stolen from your house, without you having used locks, you might not get payed by your insurance company.

It would only be worth the effort for software for which you expect broad distribution, anyway: if the code is written for a specific customer under contract, it shouldn't be hard to figure out how to insure yourself with simple and effective legal measures.

Last week, I added some copy protection on software with a limited distribution. There are licenses protecting the software. The copy protection won't be hard to break. You might think it's not useful - but actually, it is. Because bypassing the copy protection means someone make a very conscience decision to do so. And they could not claim they didn't realize they were not allowed to.

I'm not even going to go into the ethical issues I have with the idea of profitting from an incredible amount of freely provided volunteer effort while refusing to give anything back.

Oh, get off you high horse. That has nothing to do with this. You don't have any right whatsoever on software I (or someone else) write, unless *I* decide otherwise. No legal and no ethical rights.

In reply to Re^13: Perl 6 ... dead? (no, just convalescing) by Anonymous Monk
in thread Perl 6 ... dead? by hartwig

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