Sublicensing

Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus schwa at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Aug 16 20:07:03 UTC 2003


On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 12:35:54PM -0700, Colin Putney wrote:
> 
> On Saturday, August 16, 2003, at 11:09  AM, Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus wrote:
> 
> >On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 08:11:56PM +0300, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
> >>As Andrew once said, absolute legal safety doesn't exist. As it 
> >>appears,
> >>software patents are soon going to be a general problem for the 
> >>software
> >>world to deal with. We are even less likely to find a complete 
> >>solution
> >>to false accusations or honest slip ups.
> >
> >Fair enough, but that only addresses one of Cees' points.  It would be
> >very difficult for anyone in the Squeak community who wrote (say) a
> >replacement VM to argue that they had done it in a "clean room".
> >Therefore, a rewrite doesn't really buy us much.  Right?
> 
> Three points here:
> 
> First, a rewrite buys us a better VM. I can't imagine anyone would 
> write a new VM just to change the license. I also can't imagine anyone 
> would do that much work and not take the opportunity to make big 
> improvements.

Well, yes.  

> 
> Second, I don't think there *is* such a thing as a perfect 'clean room' 
> in Smalltalk. You can do it with say, BIOS. But anyone who knows enough 
> to implement a VM or a kernel is undoubtedly familiar with somebody 
> else's implementation. Who's to say that the similarity isn't with, 
> say, VW or ST80, rather than Squeak? 

The bad guy's lawyers.  Say that the VM developer in question is Tim.
His fingerprints are all over the VM code, he wrote VMMaker, and he's
always prattling on about the VM on the list.  I don't think that he
would want to state, under oath, that he wasn't intimately familiar
with Squeak's VM.

> For that matter, how could anyone claim that the original work at
> Apple wasn't influenced by anything else?

That wouldn't be a defense if you were the defendant.

Joshua

> Third, I think the notion that "absolute legal safety doesn't exist" 
> applies even more to rewrites than to patents. We cannot achieve 
> immunity from lawsuits. The question is how much legal risk are we 
> willing to take? Note that right now, we running some level of legal 
> risk that isn't terribly well identified.
> 
> Colin
> 



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list