[sldev] Re: [PROTOCOL] Protocol Documentation

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 03-Oct-2007, at 16:45, Lawson English wrote:
> I think its more a flamewar by the GPL people against the FreeBSD  
> people BECAUSE the FreeBSD people want to do something against the  
> spirit of the GPL.

Um, what are you talking about?

This was OpenBSD, not FreeBSD, and neither OpenBSD nor FreeBSD have  
been using a license that is GPL-incompatible this century.

> I'm still not sure why the GPL itself would require "clean room"  
> practices to copy *functionality*, even into a proprietary bit of  
> code.

There have been specific cases where independently developed  
components that implemented the same API as a GPLed program have been  
hit with legal action by the FSF, on the grounds that by  
interoperating with an API that was part of a GPLed program they were  
derived works and are thus covered by the GPL... even if there was no  
GPLed code in them. There was no "huge amount of cutting and pasting"  
involved... according to the FSF simply using an API documented in a  
GPLed source makes your code covered by the GPL.

There's nothing hypothetical about this. It's really happened. In one  
they ended up creating a complete implementation of the libmp library  
from scratch so that the API was no longer "a GPLed API" because  
there was a non-GPLed implementation to work from.

After a few cases like this, is it any wonder that people want to  
create a "clean room" environment around GPLed code?