[Development] Qt 4.8.6 Release Plans

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 02:20:35PM +0100, Konrad Rosenbaum wrote:
> On Monday 04 November 2013 11:46:35 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 06:49:17AM -0800, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > > We can't even click the link. If we read their patches, we can't write
> > > the same later.
> > 
> > that's nonsense. any simple patch is not subject to copyright (though
> > it's still good tone to credit the investigator). and anything complex
> > enough is likely to produce a slightly different patch anyway, even
> > after seeing the other patch. that's what copyright is about in the
> > first place: protecting *creative* works.
> 
> I hate to be so negative, but...
> 
> Oswald what you are describing is the spirit of copyright. How it is supposed 
> to work. What Thiago is describing is how it works (or often doesn't) in 
> reality.
> 
> As soon as you see a copyright lawyer in the room: run like hell! It won't 
> help, but it gives you a nice fuzzy feeling of being ahead one step... ;-)
> 
well, he can sue us.
and then we sue his arse off for frivolous complaining, and he'll pay
the bills.
you don't need to be afraid of such stuff if you have the financial
backing.
also, no sane judge would issue an injunction because of a three-liner,
so the risk of noteworthy disruption is practically zero.

also, these considerations are completely hypothetical anyway. we are
talking about some oss guy who'd most probably be quite happy to see his
patches taken in (how about asking?), and even for bigger stuff we could
just do that if the license was ok (on the site it seems to be CC-BY 2.5
by default - i have no clue whether that would be ok). most of the
patches appear to be cherry-picks anyway.