The support issue is not a big deal -- if their source code is modified then they void their warranty, just like if you open up your computer box in some cases to work on the insides.
The comment is certainly well taken. I believe the car analogy works well. It sort of reminds me of something I saw long ago when Compaq was trying to clone the early IBMs... If I remember right the Compaq engineers were writing a sort of BIOS or ROM chip which would drive their cloned systems but they couldn't be the same as IBM's for copyright reasons. So the Compaq heads just told the programmers *what* they wanted done and they went, did it, then the code was compared and if there were any similarities they told the programmers to go back and write the same thing a different way...
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The support issue is not a big deal -- if their source code is modified then they void their warranty, just like if you open up your computer box in some cases to work on the insides.
The comment is certainly well taken. I believe the car analogy works well. It sort of reminds me of something I saw long ago when Compaq was trying to clone the early IBMs... If I remember right the Compaq engineers were writing a sort of BIOS or ROM chip which would drive their cloned systems but they couldn't be the same as IBM's for copyright reasons. So the Compaq heads just told the programmers *what* they wanted done and they went, did it, then the code was compared and if there were any similarities they told the programmers to go back and write the same thing a different way...