paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi,
> gcj IIRC is clean room
I though clean room implementation was a defence against copyright
rather than patent infringement?
How can you infringe on something you've never seen. If that was the
case, any big company could happily claim that some of the methods in Qt
are rip offs of (say) MS Foundation Classes as they do the same job.
TTFN
Paul
Unfortunately, not true in either case but generally using a clean room
is sufficient to guard against copyright violations. To violate a
copyright, you have to make an unauthorized copy. It's possible that
someone working in a clean room would come up with the same code as the
original author but not very likely and the most likely elements that
would be identical (e.g., header files and interfaces) aren't
protectable elements. To infringe a software patent, you only need to
implement something the does what somebody else has already patented
(e.g., look up the stink over Amazon's "one click" shopping patent). It
doesn't matter if the development was done in a clean room.
Note that the above is not a legal opinion and I personally think the
whole idea of software patents is absurd. Unfortunately, that's not the
way the U.S. patent office sees things. You can find a much better
discussion of these concepts than my feeble attempt at
http://www.groklaw.net.
Cheers,
Dave
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