PackRat wrote: >> IMO J dictionary is copyrighted as a 'book' so that its translation >> into other human languages still being copyrighted. But computer >> software is copyrighted or patented separately. IANAL.
> Patents protect IDEAS (including processes), and copyrights protect And sanity requires patents not to apply to software (they do not apply to software in EU and Russia, which is all I care about). Anyway, patents for J would be null because of prior art, and APL patents would have already expired. > EXPRESSIONS of ideas. I asked my question from extremely careful position for some reasons. One could argue that idea (method, process) here is "optimizing software and its development by building language upon expressing the calculations in terms of operations over large arrays, and implementing each in highly optimized compiled code" or something like that. Now, the exact set of operators and notations is clearly an expression of this idea - backed by implementation, which is a more detailed expression. I do think that a court would do wrong to agree with such interpretation (as it is serving only monopolization of every market). But here I do not want to make J developers who generally do a good job to feel hurt by my development in any way. Also I do not want to start a project that the open source community will reject as betting everything on a shaky legal ground with no good reason. I do not want to do anything illegal regardless of whether it is actually punishable. I also do not want to invest any effort in J compatibility if JSoftware thinks it "should be" wrong or infringing or that it hurts them in any way. I admit that I would be reusing their work of language tuning and their work in building J community. If they disagree with my implementing a subset of J, I'd better try to learn some lessons from J, APL, Haskell, Calculus of combinators and just design something vaguely similar in spirit. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
