A tweet from @PhilRack alerted me to the fact that a verdict is imminent for the court case between SAS and World Programming Ltd (WPL). If you're a regular reader of NOTE: you'll already know that i) WPL's World Programming System is a SAS work-alike that appears to offer a cheaper alternative to the licensing of SAS/BASE and other specific modules, and ii) SAS filed a lawsuit in the High Court in London against World Programming Ltd in November 2009 for breach of license and copyright infringement.
Independent of the legal arguments, the court case raises an interesting philosophical question regarding whether it is "fair" for WPL (or any other company) to sell a system that interprets the SAS language. What are your thoughts?
I couldn't resist republishing Phil's link because it gave me all the justification I needed to repeat the "SAS Take World Programming to Court" headline. It's one of those headlines that people can't resist clicking on (I know I'd click on it if it were somebody else's blog!).
I run the web site for my son's fencing club ("Andy works with computers: obviously he's a web expert and can create a web site for us!"). Their head coach is inspirational and adopts a number of tactics for keeping the fencers engaged in the club. One of his tactics is that all fencers have a nickname and these are used at all times. The web site features a gallery of photos of the fencers, indexed by their nicknames. The most often visited fencer amongst nicknames such as Cabbage, Elf, Oak Tree, Rabbit (my son) and Yoda? Well, it has to be Psycho, doesn't it?! Who could resist checking-out the photos of Psycho to see some explanation of the origin of his name?