Re: [PATCH, HURD][RFC] hurdselect: Step7x, almost complete rewrite finished

[Svante Signell]

On Wed, 2013-02-13 at 09:29 +0000, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
> >>>>> Svante Signell <svante.signell@gmail.com> writes:
> >>>>> On Wed, 2013-02-13 at 09:07 +0100, Richard Braun wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 06:51:29AM +0100, Svante Signell wrote:
> 
> […]
> 
>  >>> - you cannot commit this code unless I agree to sign the copyright
>  >>> papers for libc (which I of course will when asked for).  This is a
>  >>> derived work of mine.  Otherwise it has to stay as a Debian patch.
> 
>  >> Really ?  That's what you choose to say here ?  Have you at least
>  >> looked at the changes he made ?  They're really not much like what
>  >> you've sent us.
> 
>  > I know, but it's still a derived work from my efforts.  If I hadn't
>  > worked on this, the current state wouldn't be as it is now.
> 
>       It seems like a common misconception that even the “paid
>       professionals” sometimes fall into.  The point is, however, that
>       the copyright law is concerned with /representations/ (i. e.,
>       code, in this case), not /ideas/ (algorithms, etc.)

You couldn't call it a clean-room implementation though. All necessary
information was available (on request) from the original submitter to
the person doing the rewrite.

>       Clearly, without Unix being available, GNU wouldn't exist.  This
>       doesn't make the latter fall under the copyright of the former.
> 
..
> PS.  Note, however, that I haven't reviewed the code being discussed,
>       and thus have no opinion on whether any of the Svante's code has
>       made its way (perhaps with trivial modifications) into the
>       Samuel's patch, or not.

No big deal really, the goal was the same, to increase the POSIX level
for Hurd :-)