Sublicensing
Colin Putney
cputney at wiresong.ca
Sat Aug 16 19:35:54 UTC 2003
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.
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? For that matter, how could anyone
claim that the original work at Apple wasn't influenced by anything
else?
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
|