[Haskell-cafe] containers license issue

[Ketil Malde]

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