Chris Gray wrote: >>The key change is "and that implementation is not available under a >>recognized Open Source license" - because except for copying, which we >>don't allow, any ideas found in open-source-licensed source code are not >>trade secrets and therefore able to be re-implemented by others in >>independent, differently-licensed implementations. > > > I do hope this is correct, because otherwise the pool of potential VM > developers is even smaller than we thought it was.
Free software comes with the freedom to study it. It would be a sad world if it was otherwise. Everyone would have to pick a single open source project to ever work on in their whole life, etc. :) The change is there because we want to avoid dealing with trade secrets, NDAs, non-competition clauses, and similar legal minefields often found in proprietary source code licenses. Those things are hard to deal with in many, many ways. Compared to that, free software is a walk in the park. Disagreements on the authorship of works, like this one, should be easy to resolve amicably, and I am glad everyone is making such a good effort towards resolving it. > Heaven help me (and Wonka) > if Dalibor finds out that for a few weeks at the end of the last century I > worked on a port of Kaffe ... I am no fan of the legal theory of a copyright without any boundaries, and Kaffe comes under a free software license allowing study & all that, just like Harmony. :) On a Harmony-unrelated side note, if you are interested in seeing your port in the Kaffe.org CVS tree, and your contract allows for it, feel free to send me the patch. :) cheers, dalibor topic
