[sldev] Re: [PROTOCOL] Protocol Documentation

[Lawson English]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>
> 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?
Sicne GnuStep uses the NeXtStep, now, Cocoa API, does this mean that 
Cocoa is now illegal?

Sounds like some lawyers and judges exercsied a bit of legal fiction in 
a vacuuum of non-understanding the real world. But, in the legal world, 
unles you have bette3r lawyers, the incredibly stupid precedence stands.


Lawson