[Haskell-cafe] containers license issue

[Ketil Malde]

Clark Gaebel <cgaebel at uwaterloo.ca> writes:

> I just did a quick derivation from
> http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#RoundUpPowerOf2 

A copyrighted work, you say?

> to get the highest bit mask, and did not reference FXT nor the containers
> implementation. Here is my code:

If copyright follows reimplementations of algorithms from other programs
(because they are considered "translations" of that program), then
surely it must also follow reimplementation from copyrighted
documentation?

I think this is wrong, copyright does not cover algorithms, and reverse
engineering is not literary translation.  The implications of anything
else would be draconian, simply documenting a program would be a breach
of its copyright, for instance, and Tanenbaum would hold the copyright
to Linux.  But in a court of law, anything is possible.

-k