Re: Octave vs. Matlab legal matters [was: Re: spline with NaNs]

[Judd Storrs]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Ben Abbott <address@hidden> wrote:
> hmmm ... my experience in IP is that the rhetoric is about as objective as 
> religion.
>
> There may be an ultimate and objective truth, but nobody will agree upon it.
>
> IP battles are often more about financial resources than what is just and 
> proper.  It is prudent to be cautious and avoid becoming engaged in such 
> conflicts.

I may not have been particularly keen in how I phrased it, but what I
meant was that just as you cannot rely on deep understanding of
Newton's Laws as a defense when the Universe "chooses" not to follow
them, you cannot expect to rely on a deep and nuanced understanding of
a end-user agreement to adequately describe the actions of the legal
world. The universe doesn't care that something called "Newton's Laws"
exist--the universe may or may not follow those laws at any particular
time depending on context. But the laws themselves have no power over
reality per se. This, in my mind, very different than what I would
consider to be the axiomatic view of Mathematics so I think it is
misguided to approach practical law from a mathematical point of view
(at least at this point).


--judd