On segunda-feira, 4 de novembro de 2013 11:46:35, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: > that's nonsense. any simple patch is not subject to copyright (though > it's still good tone to credit the investigator). and anything complex > enough is likely to produce a slightly different patch anyway, even > after seeing the other patch. that's what copyright is about in the > first place: protecting *creative* works.
The problem is that, once you've read their work, if you write the same solution you're likely to be influenced by the original. Therefore, it's not a new creative work (which copyright does allow), but a derivative work, a copy. Billion-dollar lawsuits have been filed for less. So one person alone cannot do it. Two can: - one person reads the patch and *describes* the solution to the other - the other person writes the new patch without looking at the code of the first This is called clean-room reimplementation. It's permitted: copyright only covers the creative work (the implementation), not the idea. And it's a lot of overhead! Unless the original author specifically and explicitly says "this is in the public domain". -- Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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