Barry Margolin wrote: [...] > But the program to be copied is NOT open source. He wants to > reimplement it as open source, but he has to be sure that the new > version doesn't contain any vestiges of the original one that he wrote > as a work for hire.
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." http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/jul/31/openhal/ "We join Atheros in encouraging developers to avoid proprietary code in their work, using clean room approaches like the techniques used in the development of OpenHAL." About OpenHAL OpenHAL is low-level interface software for Atheros 802.11 wireless cards. Previously, Linux-based systems needed a proprietary Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) plus a wrapper driver to make use of these wireless cards. OpenHAL is a free and open source replacement for the proprietary HAL. OpenHAL was initially based on ar5k, which was used as the basis for a proprietary HAL replacement for the OpenBSD project." "using clean room" "using clean room" "using clean room" 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
