Sublicensing

Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus schwa at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Aug 16 22:45:39 UTC 2003


On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 02:33:26PM -0700, Colin Putney wrote:
> 
> On Saturday, August 16, 2003, at 01:56  PM, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> >Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>Of course not. He *is* intimately familiar with the VM. But what other
> >>VMs is he also familiar with?
> >Most of them, as it happens :-) I've actually worked for money on seven
> >different Smalltalk VMs. They are _all_ closely related, which 
> >shouldn't
> >come as a surprise since they have to run essentially the same
> >environment.
> 
> Exactly.
> 
> Joshua, let's take Ian as a less hypothetical example. He too is 
> intimately familiar with the Squeak VM. Suppose he distributed J5 under 
> the MIT license. Do you really think he'd be unduly vulnerable to a 
> lawsuit from Apple?

Ask me after we see how the SCO lawsuit turns out ;-)

More seriously, I've thought about it some more, and you're probably
right.  I don't remember who first mentioned "clean room" out of these
threads, but I latched onto the idea as being necessary to avoid
copyright infringement.  Looking around the web, I found cases where
this is not true.  Particularly in the case of VMs, since there is so
much prior art, and Tim has worked on so many of them, it would be 
difficult to say that there was copyright infringement unless the
code was very similar.  Ian would probably be OK too, since he's 
writing in C++, and from what I've seen, Jitter doesn't look much
like the current VM.

However, there might parts of Squeak that would not be so safe.  
Morphic, for example.  

All in all, though, I think that I overstated the clean room
requirement.

Joshua


> 
> Colin
> 



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