[Haskell-cafe] containers license issue

[Mike Meyer]

Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
>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.

If you don't actually copy any of the text in the latter case, that would be correct. But there's an incredible amount of grey between those two extremes of black and white, and it's possible that you've unintentionally recreated significant bits of the original.

The Oracle/Google lawsuit was all about those shades of grey - some of the API's in Dalvik were implemented by people who had read the Java sources. Oracle claimed as much as possible was derivative, Google that none of it was. The judge ruled that some uses were infringing and some uses were not. This was a technically literate judge - he ruled that one of the cases was non-infringing because he could trivially implement the function in Java himself.

The lawyer who pointed out the possible infringement here isn't really worried about losing such a lawsuit - there are lots of ways to deal with that short of actually releasing any sources they consider proprietary. They want to avoid the lawsuit *at all*, as that will almost certainly be more expensive than losing it. At least, that's what I hear from clients who ask me not to include GPL'ed software.

   <mike
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