[Freeciv-Dev] To sue or not to sue

[lduperval@xxxxxxxxx]

On 21 Jul, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>> The world doesn't owe you cross-platform compatibility, nor open source.
> 
> World owes me right of porting software to my favourite platform and
> right to write every opensource I want.
> 

If I was a lawyer, I'd argue that Hasbro's licensing is monopolistic.
Their licensing disallows any competition in the "Civ" realm. I would
also counter-sue, saying that they should be forced to provide
equivalent implementations on platforms other than Wintel. By
equivalent, I mean that if it isn't buggy in Windows, it can't be
allowed to be buggy on other platforms.

Any lawyer who could win a case like this would pretty much destroy the
current sorry state of software. Companies would no longer sue people
who are doing similar implementaions of software because they would then
be forced to provide their software in platforms othere than their
preferred one. This would require more resources, more money, less
profits. Whereas, if they create software and then say, "you want it on
another platform, do it yourself", they wouldn't be stuck with the bill.

Now, imagine if M$ decided to sure the GNOME project, Applix, Borland,
the KDE project, Sun, etc. all because they have software that behaves,
reads and writes Excel 5 files. Sheesh!

L