Re: [Haskell-cafe] containers license issue

Mike Meyer writes:

Niklas Larsson wrote:

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2012/12/15 Mike Meyer :

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Only if Tanenbaum documented the internal behavior of Linux before it was written.

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Tannenbaum wrote Minix, the operating system that Linus used (and hacked on) before he did Linux. Minix contained lots of features that was reimplemented in Linux.

Ah, Minix isn't documentation. And it has a radically different architecture

The point is that Linux read the source code to Minix before implementing similar things - quite likely using the same algorithms, for instance. So if containers is a "translation" of FXT, then surely Linux is a "translation" of Minix.

That makes a successful lawsuit unlikely

The point of the point is that neither of these are translations of literary works, there is no precedence for considering them as such, and that reading somebody's work (whether literary or source code) before writing one's own does not imply that the 'somebody' will hold any rights to the subsequent work. "Translations" in software is what compilers do, not reimplementing specific algorithms.

it'll never go to court, so there isn't an infringement.

Wot? -k