On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 8:11 AM D. Joe <sugarl...@etrumeus.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 07:25:25AM +0200, Bastien wrote: > > > IANAL but I seriously doubt that "porting" an idea from one language > > to another language counts as a derivative work. That would be very > > bad for the whole free software world. Every FLOSS clone out there > > is porting ideas from a software (e.g. Microsoft Office) to another > > one (LibreOffice). I think "derivative" is about lines of code, not > > about ideas. > > > > There might be ann issue about design sometimes, when it has been > > separately copyrighted -- but copyright on code does not cover design > > ideas. > > > Ah, I was wondering if/when "IANAL" would finally pop up in this thread :) > > I'm not one, either. > > That said, I am aware that questions of porting and derivative work have > caused sufficient concern in the past to drive people to use clean-room > design in their approach to re-implementation: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design > > If people are using clean-room design for Sugar and adjacent projects, I > haven't seen it yet. :-) > > In the case of free software re-implementations, the exposure to > derivative work entanglements seems even greater, since the access isn't > just to the binaries of the upstream implementation, but usually to the > source code, as well. > > One might be aware there has been ongoing concern more generally about > codebases being published publically on code-sharing sites, but without any > license statements. This led, for instance, to the creation of > > https://choosealicense.com/ > > Similar considerations apply here: If you have access to the source code, > but no license to do what you're trying to do, you can paint yourself into > a corner, sharply restricting what can be done with your work (eg, who is > willing to use, distribute, work with, contribute back to, your code). > > -- > Joe > > In the context of this thread, there was no instance of clean room design or binary-only access. And in every case, an existing license was available. -walter > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel > -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org <http://www.sugarlabs.org>
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