Re: Circumventing the GPL

[Hyman Rosen]

David Kastrup wrote:
> You mean if I pay somebody to drop a brick from a window
> when I signal him, I am not accountable for murder?

If I hire a company to develop a program for me, that
company is not me. I pay money, I provide a specification,
they deliver the software to me, and that's that. If I
hire a tailor to make me a suit, he and I do not become
one entity.

> You'll have a hard time explaining to the judge that this first
> company was not acting on your behalf and is an independent seller
> of prepackaged software.

That's not hard at all. Let's say I'm a phone compnay,
just for example, and I've developed a new fiber optic
system for which I need routers. I contract with a
company who knows how to build routers, give them specs,
and they build hardware and software for it. Then when
my customers want the routers, I buy a bunch from the
router company and sell them to my customers. Unless
I've arranged otherwise, the router company is going to
keep the copyright to the software they've developed,
which is just as I want it.