Dalibor Topic wrote:
Steve Blackburn wrote:
Dalibor Topic wrote:
Many people don't see the need to look at non-free software in
general, and chances are pretty slim that anyone I know will ever get
that bored and out of reading material to accept the 'Read only'
license, for an example of a very funny non-free software license.
I have never looked at non-free implementations, but I am interested
to know what this means for those of us who have extensive exposure to
implementations such as Kaffe (GPL) or Jikes RVM (CPL). My reading of
it is that I can't work on any part of Harmony for which I am tainted
by my Jikes RVM exposure without permission from the copyright holder
of Jikes RVM. Is that right?
Nope. :)
You can look at free software and work on other software as much as you
want to, as free software licenses do not claim further rights beyound
the rights granted to the author through copyright laws. I.e. if you
copy or modify free software works, you are bound by their license
terms, as the copyright laws grant the authors a say in derivative
works. If you don't do that, then the author has no say in your own,
original work. You are allowed to study free software (freedom 1 [1]).
You can do what you want with that knowledge, modulo patents and
creating derived works.[0]
Its not quite as simple as that (I happen to have been taking legal
advice recently on this question) - if I look at your implementation,
then I write my own, and my own is substantially similar to yours, then
I may be infringing your copyright, even if I wrote mine from scratch.
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