Rjack wrote: > > Barry Margolin wrote: > > In article <[email protected]>, > > [email protected] (Name withheld by request) wrote: > > > >> How might one ethically/legally re-write a suite of scripts one wrote > >> for a former employer, so that the new code may be shared under GPL? > > > > IANAL, but I think this is likely to be difficult. You have to ensure > > that your new code looks nothing like the old code.
http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise27.html "One way to avoid infringement when writing a program that is similar to another program is through the use of a clean room procedure. This is what was done when companies cloned the BIOS of the IBM personal computer to produce compatible systems. In a clean room procedure, there are two separate teams working on the development of the new program. The first team determines how the original program works, by examining its source code if it is available (IBM published the source code for its BIOS in a technical manual), by reverse engineering the program (by converting its object code back to source code and attempting to understand it or by testing it to see how it behaves), or by studying available user manuals and other descriptions of the programs function. This first team puts together a complete technical specification that describes the functioning of the original program. Such a specification is not an infringement, since the copyright in the original program doesnt protect its functionality, only the expression in the program that creates that functionality. Generally, an intellectual property attorney will review the functional specification to assure that it does not contain any protected expression from the original program. Given the functional specification, a second team of programmers, metaphorically in a clean room uncontaminated by the original program, implements the new program. These programmers have not seen the source code of the original program. In fact, it is best if they have never seen any aspect of the original program, getting all their knowledge of it from the functional specification. Because they havent seen the original program, they cannot be copying it, even unconsciously. A limited clean room was used by programmers at Altai when they discovered that one of their employees had written a program that included portions of a program he had worked on at a competitor. Although Computer Associates v. Altai {FN106: 982 F.2d 693, 23 USPQ2d 1241 (2d Cir. 1992)} does not spend much time on the clean room aspects of Altais new implementation, it does suggest that such a procedure results in a program that does not infringe as long as the portions that are similar are dictated by function." > > > > The GPL is irrelevant to this question, it's the same problem no matter > > how you plan on licensing the new code, unless your old employer gives > > you permission. Otherwise, there's likely to be a presumption that you > > copied some of your previous code, which you don't have rights to (the > > copyright belongs to the ex-employer). > > > > The best guide would be to study the principles underlying the > abstraction-filtration-comparison test used by the courts to > answer infringement questions. > > http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise22.html regards, alexander. -- http://gng.z505.com/index.htm (GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards too, whereas GNU cannot.) _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
