On 13/05/11 23:57, Allen Wittenauer wrote:
On May 13, 2011, at 3:53 PM, Ted Dunning wrote:
But "distribution Z includes X" kind of implies the existence of some such
that X != Y, Y != empty-set and X+Y = Z, at least in common usage.
Isn't that the same as a non-trunk change?
So doesn't this mean that your question reduces to the question of what
happens when non-Apache changes are made to an Apache release? And isn't
that the definition of a derived work?
Yup. Which is why I doubt *any* commercial entity can claim "includes Apache
Hadoop" (including Cloudera).
but they can claim it is a derivative work, which CDH clearly is,
(Though if we were to come up with a formal declaration of what a
derivative work is, we'd have to handle the fact that it is a superset.
Even worse, you may realise a release is the ordered application of a
sequence of patches, and if the patches are applied in a different order
you may end up with a different body of source code...)
Something that implements the APIs may not be a derivative work,
depending on how much of the original code is in there. You could look
at the base classes and interfaces and produce a clean room
implementation (relying on the notion that interfaces are a list of
facts and not copyrightable in the US), but whoever does that may
encounter the issue that Google's donation of the right to use their MR
patent may not apply to such implementations.
