alt Hacker NewsIf I give you a template for a postcard, it doesn’t give you the right to send it with “signed, ricardobeat” at the end. These are orthogonal concerns.
They could very well enforce login for the entire app, that doesn’t require any closed source code and everyone would be worse off.
Replies
tardedmeme • today at 1:55 AM
It does if you make the card self destruct if you don't write "signed, ricardobeat" on it. Courts have been over this in the 1990s with Nintendo. The Gameboy wouldn't boot any game that didn't start with "signed, Nintendo" so game companies just put that there and it wasn't illegal.
(Later, a trick was found to replace the signature and still boot, but it required extra chips in the game cartridge)
> it doesn’t give you the right to send it with “signed, ricardobeat” at the end.
Given this was "a developer using upstream code verbatim", in your analogy "ricardobeat" would've been printed on the blank postcard by you, then you gave me the postcard with permission to use/modify/redistribute it. Plus it'd be a machine-readable field interpreted as "this postcard supports the same envelopes as ricardobeat's template", not something read by a third-party.