Does that mean if I golf some particularly complex algorithm down to 250 characters on a single line, that cannot be copyrighted?
If we do character counts, does that mean if I spam enough meaningless drivel in the comments (my name, when I wrote this thing using a particularly lengthy date format, repeated in time zones, and using obscenely long variable names), that the header becomes copyrightable? It's rather clear to me that line count (or character count) is just one way of attempting to measure the total complexity / 'content value' of the file in question, and a highly flawed one at that. However, any attempt to fix this requires extremely complex attempts to quantify complexity of tokens or AST nodes or some such, not to mention trying to decide how much (if anything) of the comments also count towards complexity. What about comment-based meta-info such as, let's say, what is done in java by @Deprecated and @Documented? The difference between headers and classes is much clearer. I also don't see any quote that Stallman claims any source file, regardless of how trivial it is, can necessarily be fully protected by the GPL; I only see here that header files certainly _WERENT_ intended to fall under it. One does not imply the other, though I may have missed some other Stallman quote. Nevertheless, I get it; trying to put a heuristic minimum bar for 'code complexity' is a can of worms he doesn't want to open, and rightly so. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
