Re: [Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>] Re: Debian & BSD concerns
Bruce Sass writes:
> If you were to take the driver for some hardware and disassemble it, then
> write a program that performed the same function based on that
> disassembly, you would be violating the copyright because your work is
> not original.
Not quite. If your program clearly did not contain any part of the one you
studied, you would be safe. The problem is that in things like drivers
there is often one obvious best way to do things. This means that your
program will contain long stretches of code very similar to that in the
original, and you will be hard put to prove you did not copy it.
> If on the other hand you were locked in a room with a computer and the
> card, no driver, and you managed to write a driver for it based solely on
> public domain information and the response of the card to your efforts,
> then you would have an original work and could license it how you see
> fit.
In the days of the cloning of the IBM pc, this was handled by two teams.
Team A was very familiar with the pc and had the BIOS source code (IBM
published it). Team B consisted of programmers who had never seen the BIOS
source. Team A studied the BIOS and wrote a specification. A team of
attorneys sanitized this spec and passed it on to team B, which wrote a new
BIOS.
--
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org (John Hasler)
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI
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