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List:       viavoice
Subject:    [viavoice] Re: ibm's license
From:       Jim Witte <jswitte () bloomington ! in ! us>
Date:       2001-03-22 0:14:22
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> license by releasing the library's source code only to the free software
> Release the same  code to proprietary software developers under a different

  What I would be afraid of in this case (and IBM probably fears the same)
is that if I had invested a lot of money to develop a really good speech
rec system, I wouldn't want someone like Microsoft coming along and
stealing it.  While it is all well and good to say that you would only open
the source to open-source developers, it's hard if not impossible to
enforce without an NDA (which open-sourcers probably wouldn't like too
much).  And what's to prevent an MS employee, on their "time-off" signing
up as an open-source developer, looking at the code, then writing
essentially the same ideas into a MS product (not copying the source per
se, just using it as 'inspiration')?

  While this kind of 'inspiration' is why I myself would like to see VV
open-source (though I'm not sure how much inspiration it the code could
provide having not done a dissertation on neural nets and hidden markov
models), I would not put it past MS to do such "just-barely-legal" (if
that) stealing.  They've arguably done the same thing with the MacOS as
well as other outside-MS innovations.  That was perfectly legal (though it
did have to be decided in court).  But it does show that MS is perfectly
willing to use other groups' efforts to their own advantage, leveraging
their enormous market saturation.

  Now, I'm not a lawyer, so I might be completely off base how profitable
for MS to try to dissect how VV's engine worked looking at the code enough
to write a copy that would pass muster as not being stolen.

Jim Witte
jswitte@bloomington.in.us



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