examples of realistic multiprocessing usage?

[Dan Stromberg]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 3:20 AM, Adam Skutt <askutt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 20, 11:51 pm, Albert van der Horst <alb... at spenarnc.xs4all.nl>
> wrote:
>> This is what some people want you to believe. Arm twisting by
>> GPL-ers when you borrow their ideas? That is really unheard of.
>
> Doesn't matter, you're still legally liable if your work is found to
> be derivative and lacking a fair use defense.  It's not borrowing
> "ideas" that's problematic, it's proving that's all you did.  For
> those of us with legal departments, we have no choice: if they don't
> believe we can prove our case, we're not using the code, period.  The
> risk simply isn't worth it.

Many legal departments have an overblown sense of risk, I'm afraid.
And I suppose that's somewhat natural, as it's mostly the legal people
who are putting their necks on the line over such issues - though I
wouldn't be surprised to see a disciplinary action or even firing of a
techie over same.

I worked at DATAllegro when it was acquired by Microsoft.  The
DATAllegro product had significant portions that were opensource code;
Microsoft, of course, decided that they needed to "quarantine"
(meaning "eliminate", in a weird, half-way sense) the opensource
portions.

Why did Microsoft do this?  Why knowingly go through with the purchase
of a product that had large opensource parts?  Why was what they did
considered "enough" as part of a complex due diligence process, to
satisfy even Microsoft's copyright-extensionist lawyers?

When I say "copyright extensionist", I mean:
1) Their legal department once told me that a small python module
could not just be rewritten under a different license, legally,
because a small module could not be made different enough to avoid
issues.
2) Their onboarding process literally said "don't look at example code
in programming books - it entails a legal risk for the company."

What made them think DATAllegro's purchase price was still worth it,
despite this perspective on copyright?

I don't know; I have no first-hand knowledge of that process, though
ironically I did help quarantine the "offending" code.  But obviously
Microsoft management, their board and their lawyers felt it was worth
the risk at the price.  I know it had something to do with contracting
out to a 3rd party company to assess the risk and ascertain what
portions "required" excising.

Here's one such company: http://www.blackducksoftware.com/black-duck-suite
A former coworker (not of Microsoft) suggested they were the only
company in this business.  I believe Black Duck has software that
automatically detects opensource code in a body of work.

IOW, it's quite possible to demonstrate that something isn't a
derivative work, enough so to make even Microsoft's lawyers happy,
given adequate funding for the purpose.

So yeah, sometimes a programmer peeking at opensource code might be
more of a risk (== expense) than a closed-source company is willing to
take, but so might studying a book intended to help you learn
programming.  And how many programmers haven't studied a programming
book at some time in their life?

My intuition tells me (I'm not going into details - that feels too
dangerous to me personally) that part of the issue Microsoft was
trying to prevent, wasn't so much a matter of copyright safety, as
trying to avoid being called hypocritical; they've made a lot of noise
about how dangerous opensource is.  If they then turn around and
distribute opensource code artifacts as part of a Microsoft product,
then they'll probably eventually get beaten up in the tech press yet
again over the new matter.