On 25/07/12 16:06, John Floren wrote:
(snip)
Just write the code, nobody cares. The manual pages define an
interface, and you're going to implement it. The manual pages are
copyrighted, sure, because they're written works and are automatically
protected by copyright. Besides the recent Google vs. Oracle fiasco, I
can't think of a time an open-source project had legal problems by
writing new code to implement an API. And, based on a brief reading of
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1202.pdf, it looks as though a
US judge has ruled that an API is not subject to copyright; if you
implement the 9P API, you should be fine. Also, since you're doing a
free reimplementation of code which is currently available free to
everyone by the creators (Lucent), I have a hard time figuring out
exactly what basis they'd have for a lawsuit. john
Hi John - thanks for that.
Thanks also to everyone who has commented in this thread - you've been
very helpful! This is one of the most helpful lists that I've been on.
This feedback is very useful as a guide to how to proceed.
Although I'm not running Plan 9 at present (I'm on Linux), I'm very
impressed with its elegance. Everything from kbdfs to the plumber to the
Venti filesystem - it's all beautifully thought-out. The way that Venti
uses SHA1 hashes to store data reminds me a lot of Git (which I also
really like - there's another elegantly designed bit of software).
Thanks again, all - bye for now :)
- Andy
