As I understand it, the situation is worse than that. The mere existence of GPL code poses a threat to commercial software: if a programmer happens to read some GPL code and then goes on to use similar techniques in proprietary code, the owner of the
On 2001-05-28T16:14:29+0100, Simon Marlow wrote: proprietary code is in
a legally difficult position.
Really? I've assumed that GPL only deals with copyright, and techniques one uses in code are matters of patents and trade secrets.
Sure, but if the code in the proprietary source ends up looking similar enough to the GPL code, it might be hard to prove that it wasn't a derived work. This is a risk you just don't want to take if your business depends on keeping your sources non-free. Cheers, Simon
"Simon Marlow"
As I understand it, the situation is worse than that. The mere existence of GPL code poses a threat to commercial software: if a programmer happens to read some GPL code and then goes on to use similar techniques in proprietary code, the owner of the
On 2001-05-28T16:14:29+0100, Simon Marlow wrote: proprietary code is in
a legally difficult position.
Really? I've assumed that GPL only deals with copyright, and techniques one uses in code are matters of patents and trade secrets.
Sure, but if the code in the proprietary source ends up looking similar enough to the GPL code, it might be hard to prove that it wasn't a derived work. This is a risk you just don't want to take if your business depends on keeping your sources non-free.
This is the first time, I have heard about such a scenario and I don't think that it is realistic. For an infringement of copyright (rather than a patent), non-trivial amounts of code must be basically the same. This won't happen unless the programmer has a photographic memory or actually copies parts of the code. Consider that companies like IBM and SGI happily deal in GPLed code. Cheers, Manuel
Simon Marlow wrote (on 28-05-01 17:48 +0100):
As I understand it, the situation is worse than that. The mere existence of GPL code poses a threat to commercial software: if a programmer happens to read some GPL code and then goes on to use similar techniques in proprietary code, the owner of the
On 2001-05-28T16:14:29+0100, Simon Marlow wrote: proprietary code is in
a legally difficult position.
Really? I've assumed that GPL only deals with copyright, and techniques one uses in code are matters of patents and trade secrets.
Sure, but if the code in the proprietary source ends up looking similar enough to the GPL code, it might be hard to prove that it wasn't a derived work. This is a risk you just don't want to take if your business depends on keeping your sources non-free.
Not that I buy this latest doublethink [1], but some people might call that poetic justice. Some people might. But not me. No, sir... [1] <a href="http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=doublethink">doublethink</a> -- Frank Atanassow, Information & Computing Sciences, Utrecht University Padualaan 14, PO Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, Netherlands Tel +31 (030) 253-3261 Fax +31 (030) 251-3791
participants (3)
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Frank Atanassow -
Manuel M. T. Chakravarty -
Simon Marlow