MS Office on Linux 14773
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Ah, I was waiting for that!
The point is that for a real program of any size, and even for many trivial functions, the odds of two people hitting on an identical implementation are so low as to be effectively impossible. If you find two programs that bear such a close resemblance, they are almost certainly related. OSCAR and ADAPTER were like that.
The design of OSCAR followed ADAPTER very closely, and indeed 30% of the original OSCAR code was copied from ADAPTER. Altai had to do a clean-room rewrite to get rid of that 30%, despite the fact that the court eventually found that the function of the programs was so specific that there was no infringement of non-literal aspects.
Now, some forms of relation are legally permissible. Verbatim copying (as happened at first) is not legal. Clean-room reimplementation is clearly legal. There is some room to maneuver in the middle ground, but what you have suggested (renaming variables and reordering functions) is *not* sufficient grounds. See the section on "Piecewise Reimplementation" in:
Ray Ingles I'll look one up, just for you, but not just this minute, Ray. From Red Hat's General Terms and Conditions: https:--www.redhat.com-licenses-rhelus3.html?country=United+States& "The term...
"Many people have reimplemented computer programs by rewriting them to replace the source code with code of their own writing. There is no reason to believe that this would not be a copyright infringement, particularly if the reimplementer had access to the source code of the original program, even if none of the original source code remains."
Even taking a more-than-de-minimis portion of a work and incorporating it into your own is not legal without permission. See the section breastled "Derivative Works and Compilations" in the above reference.
"When two or more preexisting works are combined to form a new work, in copyright law that work is called a compilation... The copyright in the resulting overall computer program comprises the copyrights in the preexisting component computer programs and a new copyright in the compilation. But that compilation copyright is very limited."
Ray Ingles Never nicked a byte, Ray. Purely an intellectual exercise. As to why no one behaves differently, read the transcripts of the DOJ-states vs Microsoft trial. Full of incredibly moronic...
-- Sincerely,
Well, no frickin' duh. The *point* was that they had to rewrite the code from scratch. Altai tried to do exactly...
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
Ray Ingles You cannot use Red Hat's media either, since it contains the logos and trademarks that cannot be...
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