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Re: [ROFL] GCC's GPLv3 "Updated License Exception"


From: Alfred M. Szmidt
Subject: Re: [ROFL] GCC's GPLv3 "Updated License Exception"
Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:19:56 +0100

   >    The degree of creativity involved in writing a few comparison
   >    and conditional/unconditional jump instructions is too low to
   >    merit copyright, just as composing the sentence "This is
   >    silly." would be.

   > Well, depends... Duff's device is quite a smart way to unroll a
   > loop, and loop unrolling is quite trivial.

   > Saying out right that making a efficient switch statment is
   > trivial, is really not true, if you have a long one, you really
   > wish to do it as fast as possible, and might resort to vector
   > tables or other stuff.

   Trivial it may or may not be, but what I said was that it's too trivial
   TO MERIT COPYRIGHT.  In any case, the machine instructions in a piece of
   object code weren't written by the copyright non-owner.  They were
   mechanically generated by a program (a compiler) written by him, the
   creative input being supplied by the author of the C code.

Someone had to write the assembly code for generation of a switch
statement, and that is copyrightable.  The compiler then inserts parts
of it verbatim (prelude, epilouge code for example) into the program,
or with some other transformation on top of that.

So, a naive switch statement might not be copyrightable, but a complex
one sure is.




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