Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available

[tmoran@acm.org]

> As you probably know, if you read someone else's source code and then
> write down what you've read and distribute it with a different license,
> then you infringe on the original author's copyright. Therefore, someone
> who's maintaining a GMGPL fork of the Gnat runtime should be careful to
> avoid looking at any GPL version of the runtime. Because of the tight
   From "The Software Developer's and Marketer's Legal Companion"
"Software copyright protection does not cover functional elements that
are inherent in the idea of a particular application."
   So if you look at their patches and see that one consists of
initializing a previously uninitialized variable, I would expect it would
be completely legitimate for you to say "ah, the bug was the uninitialized
variable so I will insert code, not copied from them, whose function is to
initialize it."  If one person analyzed their code to figure out what
function it performs, then told a coder to implement that function, that
would be OK.  But then IANAL.