On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Andrew Deason <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:08:41 +0000 > Simon Wilkinson <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Finally, it does raise the question of what the copyright of the >> finished document actually is. Is the new standardisation document, in >> effect, a derivative of the original XG files, and so IPL'd? Are the >> XDR and RPC descriptions contained within that document under the IPL, >> and so unusable by GPL (or commercial) implementors? > > I'm not sure if this is a valid analogy, but this reminds me of how > (I've been told) IBM PCs in the 80s were reverse-engineered by IBM-clone > makers. They'd have someone look at some BIOS microcode or something, > and write a spec from it. Then they'd get someone else who had seen > _only_ the spec to write new code to fit the spec. The resultant code > was not considered derivative of the original IBM code (or perhaps just > not derivative 'enough' for copyright purposes?), though I'm not really > sure how. If it were, I'm not sure how Compaq would've gotten away with > doing that.
In general this practice is called a "whiteroom implementation", e.g. you had a description and went into a bare white room and did it again. _______________________________________________ AFS3-standardization mailing list [email protected] http://michigan-openafs-lists.central.org/mailman/listinfo/afs3-standardization
