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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,3e26dfa741e64e5f X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local01.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:32:24 -0500 From: tmoran@acm.org Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available References: X-Newsreader: Tom's custom newsreader Message-ID: Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:32:24 -0500 NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.6.102.223 X-Trace: sv3-uD8+Ljk0MLHCgFw02tLdFPpJZaDbd+g8/7HjzlgfDURrHKVUwvMDd5T2NSFFh9GB66nOz5aoMjL7BXO!qjVa/nInWo6VfUC18pXBTQnlxeDm+IJzUqd7RoqhsZI5mxxIp5ZaOoo1MBIt+vbrcM3OMcZrDHQU X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.32 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4850 Date: 2005-09-17T18:32:24-05:00 List-Id: > 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.