Re: lynx-dev Re: license

[Brett Glass]

At 04:21 PM 10/6/99 -0400, Gene Collins wrote:

>It is a legal license, 

Its legal status is unclear. It's never been shown that "copyleft,"
which is designed to subvert copyright, is legal. And it may well
not be, since it violates the intent of the relevant clause of the
Constitution. Also, because it's a "take it or leave it" license
that's attached to the goods, parts of it may be invalid, just
as certain terms of shrinkwrap licenses have been ruled invalid.

>which you don't happen to like, that's all.  Go
>away and start coding, if you are able, which I'm seriously beginning to
>wonder about.

Actually, we did, while all this was going on. Two nights ago, we had a
triumph. We were speaking raw HTTP transactions -- with no interpretation
of the HTML -- on our FreeBSD box. A big first step.

What we need now is code some of the code we could use to INTERPRET 
the HTML, forgiving the mistakes introduced by Microsoft Frontpage,
Netscape Composer, and of course human beings who edit their code
by hand. Unfortunately, much of the Lynx code which does this
is in the files whose licensing is unclear and whose authorship is
obscure or unknown. I hope we don't have to do yet another parser, but
it may be necessary.

--Brett