--- Rick Moen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Quoting James Michael DuPont ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > > > www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/linux/gpl-ucc2b.html > > > > Does anyone care to comment? > > Matt Welsh's observation amounts to saying that the GPL (and, by > extension, other licences) place no impediment on writing an > independent > implementation of the same idea. That's true. It's a clear > consequence > of copyright law wither or without UCC 2B. That's what makes > copyrights > different from patents. > > (I'm making no comment on licences that purport to forbid or restrict > reverse-engineering.) > > > The GPL is based on the assumption that any derived work based on > GPL'd > > software must make use of the source code, which is not necessarily > > true. > > A work created by observing how the original functions, and then > independently writing code that performs the same function, is not a > "derivative work" in the sense defined in copyright law (and referred > to > in the GPL text). >
The reason why I am asking this is following : I am proposing the following scenario to get replace non-fee libraries in free software. We reverse engineer the free software and extract all the usage of the non free library from the free software. My argument is simple, if we take all the calls to the non free library as used in free software, and intercept them, and reverse engineer them, No one can argue that the result is non-free. Who can argue that extracting mechanically all the usages of non-freesoftware from free software is all of a sudden non free. It is safe to have copies of free software. It is safe to mechanically extract code from free software. It is safe to contain copies of the free software. All we need to do this properly is the permission of a group of people who has a large application written using each this non-free library to use the results of the non-free compile to extract parts of that. I would say that what I am proposing is real competition : 1. Marketing: finding out the market for replacement, what DLLS need replacing. 2. Aggressive Competition: we approach the customers, the users of these dlls, we sell the on the idea of Liberating their software. We offer to take the hard and creative work that they have done and remove the dependany on non-free software. 3. Re implementation We re implement the functionality used of the customers, with free software. We don't have to re implement all the functions, all the concepts, because not all are used. By the usage of ILStubInterceptor we can find out what code is used the most. I think this is completely fair and legal way to replace non-free software with free software. My proposal requires that some willing contributor has done the creative manual work to use a non-free software, and allows us to capitalizes on that creative work. What do you think? What if the non-free lib had a non-reverse engineering clause, and was covered by patents? mike ===== James Michael DuPont http://introspector.sourceforge.net/ __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
