Hi, On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Petr Baudis wrote: > Dear diary, on Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 10:39:55PM CEST, I got a letter > where Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> said that... > > >From a standpoint of copyright (which the GPL relies on), this is not > > possible: you cannot include C code into Java. And if it is _translated_ > > from C into Java, it is not copyrighted any more. > > now that's a pretty strong statement - did a lawyer tell you that? <politics> No. And I hate the fact that more and more people are actually accepting the idea of being dictated how they should live by lawyers. If a law is not clear to a layman, it should not be enforcable. </politics> > (Lawyer in what country? Germany?) Because copyrights are generally > retained over translations, otherwise I could freely publish > e.g. Czech translation of someone else's English book without any > permissions and such, which is obviously not the case. <message="I am not a lawyer... sh1t, I am disgusted by those"> The bigger problem is to _prove_ that it is a translation. It is much easier with a 300-page book you translated from English into Czech. It is almost impossible to prove something was copied if the source language is a procedural computer language, and the target language is an object-oriented computer language. Given the technical abilities of judges, I even doubt that the act of the translation would _not_ be deemed a non-literal transformation of the source code (and thus not be a copyright case). </message> > There has been actually similar issue with OpenTTD - it was created by > translating Transport Tycoon Deluxe assembly to C without permission of > original TTD copyright owner (not that anyone actually knows for sure > who that is, after series of company mergers and buyouts). I don't think > anyone consulted a lawyer about legality of that either but I believe > that most people agree that this is basically illegal (but most likely, > noone will ever sue, or care at all). <politics again=true> Let's be honest: lawyers will only be interested in the money they get. They will not care one wit about what is right or wrong: just look in some newspaper of your choice. This is a sad fact about our world (but there is a remedy: look into the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy). The consequence is: no lawyer will properly defend the work of open source people, since they tend to be poor (well, at least not rich). You just cannot make much money by being nice. </politics> Ciao, Dscho - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html