ROI in OSS (was: GIMP 2.2 splash screen ...)

[Fred]

On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 15:50, Randy Edwards wrote:
...
>    While the documentary site claims there were many issues involved, the only 
> one I recall at the time was one of simple code piracy.  In that, in my view, 
> there was no doubt.  I knew one person who was called to the trial as an 
> expert witness, and many people who looked at the code; they reported that 
> there was a large amount of temporary variable names and code that were just 
> identical.  To me, it was a simple case of pirating someone's code, and 
> despite that the Arc source code was available, it was shareware and was not 
> public domain.

Pity they didn't have Open Source licensing back then, which would've
encouraged this type of innovation. Yes, I was an avid user of PKArc
myself back then, and the extra compression *mattered* since storage
space was still a premium in those days -- not to mention the looong
upload and download times on 12- and 24-Kbaud modems, etc.

Looking back, I really don't know how we all managed to live in such
small spaces and slow transfer times! :-)

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Fred Mitchell, HydraNuke.com
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