Re:Lyft Carpool: A New Way to Commute
by prawn on Tuesday March 29, 2016 @04:23PM
(#11384571)
If they wanted/needed to pay a higher amount, could Lyft get around this by paying the driver two fees - a first constrained one to skirt the insurance rules and then a "separate" fee for another component such as advertising or data provision or something else plausible but arbitrary?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
A 1992 email from Richard Stallman about libreadline's license is, oddly enough, relevant here:
"The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.
"What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be 'subterfuges' and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is 'really' one program, rather than how it is labeled.
"So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL."
Judges are not computers, and are generally capable of seeing through your clever plans.