Re: On interpreting licences (was: KDE not in Debian?)
On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, David Johnson wrote:
> Oh, but it does! I'm sorry that I can't quote the relevant law to you,
> not being a lawyer or anything. But there have been court cases in the
> past that have determined that APIs cannot be copyrighted. A footnote
> containing a chapter or page reference is the prose equivalence to an
> API. For a program, a reference to call a function elsewhere is
> analogous to a footnote and the #include <qapplication.h> statement is
> analogous to any entry in a bibliography.
If you want someone to believe you when you say an API cannot be
copyrighted, you should include a legal reference to support your claim.
Secondly, the claim is not that the API is copyrighted, it's that the
code calling it is derivative of the implementation of the API. There's a
difference. You'd have to do some work to show me that in all cases a
function call is equivalent to a footnote - footnotes you don't need to
see to understand the text, a non-standard API I need to know at least the
documentation for the library implementation (which probably describes,
but not defines, the API). In the case of a standard, the function call
gets its meaning from the standard's definition rather than that of any
particular implementation, so the calling code's meaning is independent of
that library implementation.
Lynn
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