[Haskell-cafe] containers license issue

Mike Meyer mwm at mired.org
Sat Dec 15 18:42:44 CET 2012


Niklas Larsson <metaniklas at gmail.com> wrote:
>2012/12/15 Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>:
>> Only if Tanenbaum documented the internal behavior of Linux before it
>was written.
>Tannenbaum wrote Minix, the operating system that Linus used (and
>hacked on) before he did Linux. Minix contained lots of features that
>was reimplemented in Linux.

Ah, Minix isn't documentation.  And it has a radically different architecture than either Linux or Unix (which it copied features from). That makes a successful lawsuit unlikely should Tanenbaum pursue one - but you can't say for certain until after a court rules on it.  Which is the bottom line in such cases: if the copyright holder doesn't care, it'll never go to court, so there isn't an infringement. 

>Same thing with Stallman, do you think he never saw the Unix sources? 

Did he ever write anything that was copied from Unix? The Hurd used a completely different architecture than Unix.  Emacs predated Unix.  By the time he got around to writing a c compiler, there were more from people other than AT&T than from AT&T. And gcc drew more from the lisp community than from the Unix compilers. 
-- 
Sent from my Android tablet with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my swyping.



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list