Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 17:46:40 -0700 From: "David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> To: "G. Adam Stanislav" <redprince@redprince.net>, "W Gerald Hicks" <jhix@mindspring.com>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Why are people against GNU? WAS Re: 5.0 already? Message-ID: <000001bfbd3d$ddcbf810$021d85d1@youwant.to> In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20000513193524.00898eb0@mail85.pair.com>
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> At 16:43 13-05-2000 -0700, David Schwartz wrote: > > Suppose the patent was granted to Lempel and Ziw, > > But it wasn't. The point, when intelligent people reach agreements, the default is irrelevant. If either side is unhappy with the default, they are free to negotiate a different agreement. A law that said, "unless a contract says otherwise, payment must be made in dimes" would do nothing but irritate people. Every contract would very rapidly say otherwise. You can't simply point to a default and point to a situation where the default wasn't overriden and blame the default for the result. Had Lempel or Ziv wished to retain rights to their developments, they could have easily negotiated that agreement. Had Unisys insisted on having them, it could have put that in their employment contracts unless a law actually prohibited such assignment. A law prohibiting you from doing something you could trivially refuse to do doesn't help you, it just gives you one less thing to bargain about. DS To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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