Wednesday Writs: Debbie Does Dallas, and the Public Domain

Em Carpenter

Em was one of those argumentative children who was sarcastically encouraged to become a lawyer, so she did. She is a proud life-long West Virginian, and, paradoxically, a liberal. In addition to writing about society, politics and culture, she enjoys cooking, podcasts, reading, and pretending to be a runner. She will correct your grammar. You can find her on Twitter.

Related Post Roulette

8 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    WW2: I wish we could say that kind of behavior from investigators was a thing of the past, however…

    WW6: Get this at oil change places all the time. I need fresh oil, not a radiator flush, not an engine air filter, not a cabin air filter, etc.Report

    • veronica d in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      It would be funny to buy a literally brand new air filter, install it, and then cruise into a oil change place and see if they try to sell you a new air filter.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to veronica d says:

        I haven’t done that with a brand new air filter, but I had recently replaced mine (like 3 weeks prior). Thing was, the air filter I installed had a blue rubber housing, and the one they showed me was orange.

        Declined the replacement, never called them on it, just never went back.

        I did verify that my blue filter was still there when I got home.Report

  2. Michael Cain says:

    WW1: I’m (slowly) getting ready to open-source a piece of software I’ve written. To work properly, it depends on a lot of other open-source software being installed. It seems like every one of those packages is distributed under a different open-source license. List of licenses known to be used by the collection of software:
    – Perl artistic license
    – GNU general public license version 2
    – GNU general public license version 3
    – GNU Affero public license
    – GNU lesser public license, multiple versions
    – MIT open-source license
    – Apache open-source license
    – at least one home-grown open-source license

    I am so happy that the legally meaningless term “copyleft” seems to be disappearing — it’s always been copyright plus a license and should have been described that way. The GNU instructions for using the license now start with what the Debbie Does Dallas people should have done: first, put a copyright notice in the source code file containing your main routine.Report