Re: GPL traitor !

[ZnU]

In article <guff2i$6ji$1@colin2.muc.de>, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> 
wrote:

[snip]

> Eh?  What's that got to do with anything?  It just means you're free to
> crack a program restricted by "technological measures" to discern its
> external data formats and interfaces, so that you can build a compatible
> program.  That's irrelevant for GPL'd programs, since the source code is
> available, and (by definition) GPL3 programs don't contain such
> "technological measures".  I suppose you might crack a GPL program as a
> technical exercise, training for cracking close source programs, but so
> what?

Hmm.... There's an interesting question here. Let's say you want to 
write a proprietary program that implements the same file format as a 
GPL'd program. Can you really just read the source code to figure out 
that file format, and then go write your app? Or do you have to go 
through a clean-room process, where you have one guy look at the GPL'd 
code and write up a spec, and another guy write the code to implement it?

[snip]

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