Ahem.
Navaho, please edit your post to remove the phrase "get off your soapbox". Unfortunately, it's intellectual property of the person who first coined the term a hundred years ago in Hyde Park, London. You can find more of that here:http://www.wordwizard.com/clubhouse/founddiscuss.asp?Num=1494
"Call Me Ishmael". Famous line, eh? From Moby Dick, a wonderful book. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". Ahhh, A Tale of Two Cities. Wonderful literature. Me quoting from them, however, is not a violation of intellectual property.
I'm assuming that you start your UBB scripts with the shebang line. Theoretically, they look something like #!/usr/bin/perl. That's a line from your script. So... I'm ripping you off if I modify that line to #!/usr/bin/perl -w? It's a line of your code.
Why, by golly! Imagine all the mailing and USENET posts that have promoted turning -w on. They're all stealing your code and infringing your intellectual property!
From the discussion, it looks like I could create a hack site called "Code for the Remotely Good And Sadly Microsoftian Bulletin Board". And then I could include instructions that say "replace line 17 of the file that authenticates users with this one instead".
"Call Me Ishmael". I change that to "Call Me Morbus". Infringement? Not at all! print "UBB";. print "RGASMBB";. Infringement? Not at all! Also, the license makes no mention of the data file that UBB creates - and we all know that comments posted on boards are owned by the commentor itself. So, your license doesn't prohibit me from creating a hack that reads the data files and then modifies then.
Hell, if the only thing that would make a hack site legal would be not mentioning your name, and not posting your code (either raw or as part of instructions), then sign me up - I'll be more than happy to host one.
[ July 26, 2001 06:15 PM: Message edited by: morbus_iff ]
