A sentence of roughly one to three years' jail is expected for a man who sold source code for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. A Connecticut man has pleaded guilty in a US federal court to selling Microsoft source code over the Internet.
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Member since:2005-06-29
"If you're not a monopoly, only doing it for the money, you can't have people locked up... "
Not entirely true, but sadly close.
I still remember on the news when people convicted of murder would sometimes get no more than 5 years in jail while in the meantime anyone comitting internet or business related crimes would get anywhere between one and three decades in jail.
We have a real crazy legal system, and just like the governments of Canada and the U.S. it does favor the businesses.
Member since:I still remember on the news when people convicted of murder would sometimes get no more than 5 years in jail while in the meantime anyone comitting internet or business related crimes would get anywhere between one and three decades in jail.
That's because the internet is an unknown and crimes on it are hard to gauge, while murderers are easy to understand and there is plenty of case law.
That doesn't make it right, though.
Member since:2005-07-27
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You should be able to get the same penalty for breaking any software licenses.
But I doubt we'll ever see anyone serving time for not releasing their changes to GPL source.
Because we're just hypocritical like that.
If you're not a monopoly, only doing it for the money, you can't have people locked up...
But I doubt most GPL projects would want to have people locked up for breaking the license. They just want access to the source.
Money and jail time are somewhat irrelevant compared to access to intellectual property. That's simply access to thoughts and ideas, something that's very valuable for big business and when its licensed in a way that makes it free, something that's very freightening as it is a source of competition that can't be bought.
What stupid games we play... dancing around all these little details and restrictions instead of making our stupid intellectual property. That is why commercial software will lose, inevitably.
Just like all forms of life. Entropy will wear everything down to dust in the end, except those lil organized and somewhat intelligent replicating systems.