Washington Gas is neither a tiny company nor in the boonies. And AT&T often doesn't have a local lawyer with offices across the street from your county's small claims court.

They also (and this is important) have to show up in court to defend themselves.

I had billing trouble with the local natural gas company. The billing department took a similarly hard-line stance about my complaint. A year and a half later as I refused to pay, they escalated the matter to a lawyer.

It took one 5-minute conversation with their lawyer and the matter was resolved. Because I was right? No. Because it was cheaper to let me have my way than go to court, win or lose.

I'm not a fan of rules, of someone telling me how to do my job. Not a fan when the boss tries to do it. Even less a fan when the local 409 tries.to do it.

Programming is a creative endeavor. If I'm not free to create then its just another suck job. And life's to short to spend it working a suck job.

So the deathmarch would be acceptable if the boss further cut the quality control work in order to deliver on time? Really? 'Cause unions don't demand schedule changes, they only demand that workers get paid. And the kind of boss that requires a deathmarch places a priority on his uneducated concept of "good enough."

Seriously, if that's acceptable to you I don't want you on my team or anywhere near my code. At any salary.

Manning is a vile, conscienceless poor excuse for a human being who thinks the world owes him something. The patriotism in Snowden's behavior is at least debatable but Manning? The guy/gal whose response to a bad month was to indescriminately dump every secret he could get his hands on? What's wrong with you?

I disagree. Learn how to program in a well structured manner that other programmers have some hope of following when they read your code. THEN learn how to juggle memory while programming in a structured manner.

If you haven't written code in C and assembly, you're not yet a computer scientist. But don't start there! Learn addition and subtraction before you learn algebra and learn Java or another learning language before you learn C.

I'm 41. I started my own software consulting business this year. I had plenty of job offers. I even interviewed at Google a couple of times. But I wanted to do my own thing. And I'm doing quite well at it.

If your programming career was over at 40, what did you do that caused you to miss while I kept on hitting?

What would a union require of management that would make an unacceptable programming job acceptable?

Would you enjoy the work if only the boss didn't demand you work Saturdays? You would not.

Would the union be able to get rid of the office fool who screws up your otherwise beautiful code while convincing the boss its your fault? It would not. That's not what unions do.

Would you be paid more? Programmers who are any good are in high demand. If your boss isn't paying you fairly, find the next job. If no one is willing to pay you more despite the high demand for talented programmers and you're not willing to start your own business and take on the risks yourself then you're already paid what's fair for your level of talent and the level of risk you're willing to accept.

Unions are for folks whose labor is trivially replaceable. Work that most anybody can be "trained" to do. Programmers are artists. Instinct is not trainable and talented programmers are not easy to hire. Managers who think otherwise don't last long as managers of software development projects.

Python is a terrible choice for learning. C++ is not a great choice either. You want a learning language to be highly structured so that you're pushed away from sloppy programming practices that less structured languages allow.

Pascal was a good choice of learning language. Now that OOP has proven out, Java is a good choice. Stay away from the rest until you're competent in one of those two. Like Picasso said: Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

AFAIK, torrent clients don't keep a log of who they transferred parts of the file to.

If the pirate sold your software (directly or as part of a derivative work) then it had monetary value to him. There are a couple other ways to calculate it as well. Basically, plaintiff and defendant both produce analyses of how much of the defendant's software was actually the offending work and the judge either picks the one which makes the most sense or uses parts of each to produce his own analysis. Both sides have to be careful here to maximize their respective benefit without crossing the line to unreasonable since the judge will discard any analysis he deems unreasonable. Apply that formula times the defendant's gross revenue for the software. If the infringement is willful (defendant knew up front he was infringing and did it anyway), the judge then triples it.

I believe you mean that copyright and patent infringement is a more serious _tort_ than license violation. We're talking about civil law here, not criminal law. No one at Versata is going to jail over this.

Statutory damages are a substitute for situations where real damages can't reasonably be proven. Such as making songs available via torrent where it's plain impossible to know how many folks ultimately received the song. That doesn't appear to be the case with Versata. Courts hate to apply statutory damages where it's practical to calculate real damages.

Also, you missed option E: stall the court proceedings while revising the software to work around the infringement, then do everything practical to minimize the monetary payout for the then strictly past infringement.

The recipient of the derivative work can enforce the GPL license between himself and the creator the derviative work. Said license came into effect as a result of the creator's acceptance of the GPL when he received the original work and its subsequent distribution.

The end user has no standing against the creator of the original work -- that license is between the original creator and the derivative creator. But he most certainly has standing in his license with the derivative creator which the derivative creator is shown to have established as a result of his acceptance of the GPL from the original creator.

Only if the creator of the derivative work accepted the GPL license of course. If he didn't then the work is simply infringing and the GPL does not come into play at all.

Here's this wonder free software, please use it! By the way, down here buried in the fine print you might not be allowed to use it, we'll let you know later if we don't like you. Trust me, it's fraud.

You can distribute your own code with any licenses you please, but each license must completely spell out the rights granted and responsibilities demanded. Lies of omission are still lies, lies with a financial impact are fraud, and the GPL doesn't allow for modification -- if you want to add patent limitations you have to use a difference license.

Versatta can't be in violation of the GPL unless they distributed their software under the GPL. As I understand it, whether their software was distributed under the GPL is still in dispute.

The claim in this subthread was, "the GPL does not create new obligations upon authors who combine original works with GPL works"

If you accept license to the GPL'd work, that plainly isn't true. What part of the phrase "If you accept license to the GPL'd work" was unclear? Yes of course if you don't accept the GPL license to the work then it's simply infringing and nothing in the GPL applies.

A decent argument can be made, but you can come at this one from a number of angles. For example, GPL v2 section 4 says: "However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance." This means that IF Versata accepted the GPL license then none of their customers are in violation unless those customers further redistribute the software. Even though Versata itself is in violation. More importantly, it means that IF Ximpleware asserts that Versata accepted the GPL (they seem to make this claim) that must also mean that the GPL license flowed down to everyone who received the software from Versata and themselves accepted the GPL license. Even if they never requested the source code and don't care to.

But that's just the thing - they ARE using it within the context of using VTD-XML. It just happens to be a copy of VTD-XML that's embedded in Versatta's derivative work. And if you grant that the patent license comes with the download of the GPL'd code then the license must have been meant to cover as many copies of VTD-XML that the downloader cares to use.