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Single-company free software
Single-company free software
Posted Oct 11, 2005 14:37 UTC (Tue) by pj (subscriber, #4506)In reply to: Single-company free software by hgj
Parent article: Single-company free software
>What is wrong with the next statement:
>
>If version 2 of a product is GPL then version 3 of that product is a derived product of it, so version 3 must also be released as GPL.
What makes you think v3 is necessarily a derivative of v2? Many many software products and projects have done a rewrite from scratch between major versions. In such a case, the rewritten code isn't really a derivative work since they have no code in common.
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Single-company free software
Posted Oct 11, 2005 18:20 UTC (Tue) by Blaisorblade (guest, #25465) [Link]
Not necessarily. Samba4 is said to be a full rewrite of Samba3, but the notion of "derivative work" doesn't relate exactly to "common code".
If you and I write a quicksort routine indipendently, and it happens to be the same exact routine, there's no copyright violation, even if we write at different moments in time. The latter writer should just show that he never saw the other code.
Viceversa, Samba4 is written starting from Samba3 code, implementing more or less the same algorithms/protocols/whatever, but after thinking to its design problem and re-engineering it.
To make it more obvious, say the Samba3 team has disappeared and somebody else starts rewriting Samba to obtain Samba4 anew, like Andrew Tridgell is doing.
If he starts from the ideas (say reading the code) of Samba3, his code will be a derivative work.
At least, from the copyright law point of view. IANAL, anyway.
I don't know if the GPL extends his powers so long, but I know for sure that, for instance, people implementing Classpath (a full replacement of Java libraries) are disallowed from reading the Java libraries sources, to avoid lawsuits.
Conflating different meanings of "derivative"
Posted Oct 12, 2005 20:14 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]
In popular vernacular the term "derivative" can mean "inspired by" (possibly with a denigrating connotation). If I say that the old TV series "The Saint" was derivative of Ian Fleming's work in a critique of it --- that would be the likely inference.
However, the term "derivative" in the context of copyright law is somewhat more specific. There has to be a substantive copying. (Not necessarily literal copying, but copying nonetheless).
Conflating "derivative" (in the more general sense of "similar to and probably or presumably inspired by) with "copied" is exactly the sort of yellow sensationalism that SCO has been attempting in their full press public case against Linux. It appears that they've tried the same in the court of law, as well. So far the latter of these fiaSCOs has apparently been wholly unsuccessful.
JimD