This is a silly issue.

I'd be willing to testify in court that that implementation was clean. If such an issue were to ever come up, shoot me an email and I'll be there. Until then, you're going to have to take my word for it. And honestly, we do that with every bit of code we use every day. Do we really have anything except the author's word that he hasn't copied some GPL code?

And, if it ever does come up and a real clean-room implementation (with someone who's never seen FXT nor this thread) needs to be done, let me know about that, too. I know lots of kids who'd jump at the chance for a practice interview question.

I'll even do that now if Johan wants, but I doubt it's that useful. There are bigger fish in the sea, and you're chasing a minnow.

Regards,
  - Clark


On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 8:53 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 5:38 PM, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 12/12/2012 08:15 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Dmitry Kulagin
>> <dmitry.kulagin@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Clark, Johan, thank you! That looks like perfect solution to the problem.
>>
>> Clean-room reimplementation merged and released as 0.5.2.0.
>>
>
> Not even a little bit clean-room: he posted the source code that he was
> going to reimplement like two hours earlier, and had obviously read it.

Clean-room was clearly a bit over enthusiastic. He said he didn't use
the other code as a reference but instead the bithacks reference,
which is public domain. I'm comfortable enough with this. I wasn't
particularly worried about the prior implementation either, as it
don't think (as a non-lawyer) that it will hold up as copyrightable in
court due to its trivial nature and the presence of prior art (this is
a standard bit-twiddling algorithm).

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