Richard Kenner wrote:
IE they don't care whether it i printed, and don't care whether it i a
publication, they care whether it is accessible to the public and has
been disseminated to the public.
Right. That's exactly what I meant. They are saying that "printed"
vs "electronic" doesn't matter.
However, the issue here isn't whether it matters if the GCC sources were
printed in a book someplace or just available electronically.
The issue that Robert was raising is not the "printed" part, but the
"publication" part. Specifically, if source code could be considered
a "publication". Reading the reference you gave makes it sound like they're
using the term "publication" interchangably with "technical paper" in
that they're talking about online references and databases.
Nothing in that document (I didn't go to the referenced cases) seems on
point to the issue of whether source code is a "publication".
For example, at one extreme, the source code may have extensive comments
so that it is clearly a publication.
At the other extreme it could be uncommented junk, and an argument could
be made that someone with appropriate skills could not reasonably
extract the information needed.
At a really really extreme level, object code can document stuff if you
are willing to do enough reverse engineering, but would be unlikely to
qualify as publication.
I don't think this is entirely off topic, we do want to make sure that
anything we do within gcc acts at the very least as its own defence
against a patent that comes along later.
