Sublicensing

Colin Putney cputney at wiresong.ca
Sat Aug 16 20:28:01 UTC 2003


On Saturday, August 16, 2003, at 01:07  PM, Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus wrote:

>> 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.

Of course not. He *is* intimately familiar with the VM. But what other 
VMs is he also familiar with? Any VM he writes will be built on 30 
years of Smalltalk tradition. You can't copyright ideas, only their 
expression. If the new VM has no source code in common with the old 
one, it has a different expression, even if the ideas are similar.

My ultimate point is that you don't *need* a clean room implementation 
to avoid copyright violation. We may want a lawyer's opinion on that, 
of course.

>> 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.

Sure it would: "I didn't copy the Squeak VM, I copied Smalltalk-80. 
Apple also copied Smalltalk-80, and that's why my VM has a lot in 
common with Apple's."

Colin



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