🚀 go-pugleaf

   Date: 29 Apr 90 09:03:38 GMT
   From: brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu

   A much more general principle making the same point extremely clear
   appears in a section of the United States copyright statutes: an author
   can never be unwillingly deprived of his exclusive copyrights. It's a
   real shame NeXT didn't try this tack when they were bulldozed into
   distributing their compiler for free because they hadn't realized the
   effects of the GPL.

Time out for reality check: NeXT was not ``bulldozed'' into anything.
The only holdup was that the release was shunted to the bottom of the
NeXT lawyers' stack.  I confirmed this on Friday wih the person who
ought to know: the guy at NeXT who did the work.

I can't understand what all this ``unwilling'' and ``unknowing''
business is about.  You can't modify the source code without seeing a
copyright notice which either includes or points you at the license
terms.  And if you modify sources without reading them well, you have
more problems than just worrying about selling the code.

Seems to me that once you've been informed of the licensing
conditions, if you go ahead you implicitly agree to them.