[Haskell-cafe] containers license issue
Ketil Malde
ketil at malde.org
Mon Dec 17 09:52:16 CET 2012
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> writes:
> As it's commonly understood, reverse engineering doesn't involve
> looking at the code.
I guess I should make it clear that I don't use it in the strict sense -
I would call that "clean-room reverse engineering". (I'm not sure which
is the most "commonly understood" meaning, I think Wikipedia supports
both interpretations)
> That's why it's called "reverse engineering" instead of "copying."
I mean the process of reimplementing specific functionality from another
system, with or without knowledge of implementation details. I would
use "copying" to mean verbatim cut-and-pasting, which is something else.
In particular when copyright is concerned, I believe that verbatim
copying in many cases will require a license to the original work, but
merly examining the original work to make use of algorithms, tricks, and
structures from it will not.
I suspect there's nothing magical about source code, if I extract a
component (algorithm or data structure, say) from a program and use it
in my own program, I'm not convinced it matters if I extract it from
object code, source code, or documentation - they're all copyrighted
works, and could be interpreted as translations of the same work. I
could be wrong about that, though.
-k
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