It seems from reading SO that there's a lot of legal concern about Boost in some companies. Some people are apparently prohibited from using it. Since Boost is licensed under about the most permissive license you could possibly think of, where does this concern stem from. Edit: People have asked for specific posts. I don't remember ...
take youtube for example, it converts the video you upload to flash video. would youtube be considered software or service? i think it would be service. what sort of laws protect service providers ? ...
Hey. I am planing to start on a new project which has a kinda unique idea. Usually I develop things on my own server, but since that is far inferior to the Google apps engine solution i am thinking of switching platforms. However, I am worried that if I start to develop and if becomes "a success" (atleast within my standards), I have p...
I was planning to use a dock menu similiar in looks and behavior to the Mac OS X dock menu in an application. It seems that apple have patented their dock about a year ago. I've seen some websites that use a similiar dock, the article also lists a few applications that use a similiar style. What is the legal stand of this? Is this a vio...
Is it legal (either in the general sense or within the App Store) to use publically available XML feeds w/o contacting the original author? For example something like http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/7day-M2.5.xml (Not really what I'm using for my app but same type thing) ...
I've been trying to get my head around private software licenses. I'm working for several companies at the same time - most of whom share my codes and all of whom want to own everything. It creates a bit of problem for me since I don't mind them owning the code, but at the same time I don't want to re-write code snippets (classes, method...
If I were to port a GPL'ed library to a different language: Would it count as a derivate work and would I have to release my port with the same GPL? If the answer to the above question is yes, who would be considered the owner of the ported library? Would I be the owner and be able to relicense and use it in a commercial application? ...
Hi StackOverflow! Im currently planning to build an API for my service. I want to use GData because it fits the application scheme and there are libraries for many programming languages available. The first question that rose: Am I allowed to do that? I mean, Google put lots of work into the GData specification and have some sort of cop...
Hello I am new to IPhone development. In my application I would like to integrate maps. I would like a way of turning a UK postcode into a position on a map. I was going to use Mapview, but I have seen a couple of posts on the internet about not being allowed to use MapVIew for chargeable apps something to do with Google liceense. I...
Hello! My client currently scans invoices and similar documents into PDF format, and stores them in the file system. I suggested to him that we store the scans in their custom management system's SQL Server to remove one of the 'moving parts' of their system. My original idea was to store them in a lossless graphics format, but the ac...
Hi all, I'd like to write a little software which 'visits' a specific website regularly (every minute, for example) and gets specific data from there. This data is stored in a database which is used by another software I'm planning to write. Is this legal or not? Do I need the permission from the website owner? It's a complete open we...
I have a project that relies on some libraries from the Visual Studio SDK. The installer created by Visual Studio added these libraries into thee installer project automatically. I am just wondering if it is legal for me to distribute them with my project or if I need to require the users to install the Visual Studio SDK separately. ...
Anyone have experience parsing the RealLegal PTX file format? I'm interested in creating a Mac reader client for this proprietary format. The PTX file format is in wide use for storing court and deposition transcripts. ...
Lets say person X posts some code on a public forum (totally public, even to guests), and they post it without an explicit 'license'. Person Y then comes along and decides to use that code in a proprietary application. Is that legal? What about using the code in an open source application? Is it only legal if they give attribution? Is...
We agreed some time ago that a company produce a specification for a piece of internal software. Until they produce the spec, we won't agree to the contract for the implementation. They have sent us a confidentiality agreement to sign, covering the "program specification". I have a few questions: Is this normal practice? Since the do...
Possible Duplicate: Switch statement fallthrough in C#? The following code is illegal in C# because control cannot fall through from one case label to another. However, this behaviour is perfectly legal in C++. So, how would you go about coding the same behaviour in C#? enum TotalWords { One = 1, Two, Three, Four } ...
I would like to ship an application that uses images based on icons found in Shell32.dll (e.g. picture of a hard disk, folder, text file, etc). I don't want to load the images from the common DLL at runtime because the images or their indices may change across various versions of Windows. I just want to repackage them in my application...
Is there a way to confirm (programmatically) that the application was purchased from AppStore? Or, maybe, there is a way to get a list of devices IDs from AppStore that purchased my app? The reason is the willing to determine if the application was legally purchased or not... I know that there is a way to know that the in-app purchase ...
I was going to crawl a site for some research I was collecting. But, apparently the terms of service is quite clear on the topic. Is it illegal to now "follow" the terms of service. And what can the site normally do? Here is an example clause in the TOS. Also, what about sites that don't provide this particular clause. Restriction...
I am starting a web business, which is still in the planning stages. We are about a week into development, and we have a skeletal web site up on a test server. We have our business plans pretty well drawn out at our project management site which uses Redmine, so all our ideas are contained in our database. All our ideas are either in ou...