[squeak-dev] Re: [ANN] Kernel methods license audit
Paolo Bonzini
bonzini at gnu.org
Thu Mar 20 18:04:35 UTC 2008
> he wrote the new code that probably has the same content as the
> original one. [...]
>
> we simply have to trust people that they will not cheat. And they should
> be ready to sign it.
Of course. But the bigger problem is the first.
In the case of accessors, for example, the original contributor could
have contributed a single change to add those accessors, or these
methods could be part of a bigger change. The first case probably is
not even copyrightable; in the second the overall changeset is
copyrightable, and I wonder if a judge would be convinced if they were
shown the exact same source code up to the MD5 checksum.
After all saying "a method that returns instance variable foo" is not
different from saying "a method that does ^foo". It is not talking
about an idea, the idea *is* the implementation (all this of course
holds because the "first team" does see the source code, it does not
apply if there was English documentation that the "second team" could
directly look at).
In both cases, it looks like chasing windmills; you should get clear
advice if it isn't better to just leave these simple methods aside, with
attribution to the original author.
Paolo
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