From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,faf964ea4531e6af X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1025b4,43ae7f61992b3213 X-Google-Attributes: gid1025b4,public From: Robert Dewar Subject: Re: [O/T 4 cla] Re: GPL and "free" software Date: 1999/05/12 Message-ID: <7halnl$n8$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 476809240 References: <7fibd5$jc7$1@news2.tor.accglobal.net> <7h83tf$150$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <7h8aqf$4nm$1@Mercury.mcs.net> <7h97qi$t1j$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <7ha31n$htn$1@Mercury.mcs.net> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x40.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. X-Article-Creation-Date: Wed May 12 01:32:37 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,gnu.misc.discuss X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-05-12T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <7ha31n$htn$1@Mercury.mcs.net>, les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell) wrote: > Of course not - this is usenet. Anything goes here. I am not quite sure what that means. It is always important to understand what kind of knolwedge and experience goes into usenet posts. The "of course not" here is not appropriate. Yes there are plenty of people posting who do not have the knowledge to post but post anyway, but there are also many experts who do speak as experts (we have had at least one person whom I assumed was an attorney or at least very knowledgable in the law posting here, and up to the above, I had assumed that you had similar expertise). > But I do have a pretty good understanding of what a patch > actually does. I think you may assume that we all know what a patch is (says he trying to keep from making some sarcastic comment :-) Seriously, of COURSE we all know what a patch is, but that has little to do with the discussion at hand, which is not about patches but about software copyright. The issue is knowing how software copyright works in terms of case law. The case law here is not inaccessible, in fact it makes quite interesting technical reading. You can't figure out what the law is by thinking about what it *should* be according to your common sense view, you have to look at what the statutes actually say, and in this particular case, understand the abstraction process, which is the key here, and which I think you are not understanding as best I can read your posts. Once again you do NOT simply copyright text when it comes to software, you copyright protectable elements of the design at all levels of abstraction. Could you copyright an empty file. I would say that you can certainly see circumstances in which an empty file could be copyrighted. Suppose a file represented some particular option in a standard algorithm. You discovered a new more efficient form in which this option was not needed. You program the result, and the file for the option is now null since the option is not needed. I would guess that this would be a protectable element. But you would have to look at the exact circumstances to actually make a judgment. Software copyright is not a simple issue, as many recent court cases have shown. --== Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ ==-- ---Share what you know. Learn what you don't.---