[AFS3-std] Re: Copyright, internet-drafts and .xg files

[Andrew Deason]

On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:08:41 +0000
Simon Wilkinson <simon@sxw.org.uk> wrote:

> Finally, it does raise the question of what the copyright of the
> finished document actually is. Is the new standardisation document, in
> effect, a derivative of the original XG files, and so IPL'd? Are the
> XDR and RPC descriptions contained within that document under the IPL,
> and so unusable by GPL (or commercial) implementors?

I'm not sure if this is a valid analogy, but this reminds me of how
(I've been told) IBM PCs in the 80s were reverse-engineered by IBM-clone
makers. They'd have someone look at some BIOS microcode or something,
and write a spec from it. Then they'd get someone else who had seen
_only_ the spec to write new code to fit the spec. The resultant code
was not considered derivative of the original IBM code (or perhaps just
not derivative 'enough' for copyright purposes?), though I'm not really
sure how. If it were, I'm not sure how Compaq would've gotten away with
doing that.

So, I'm not really sure how it works, but that leads me to believe that
our RPC descriptions are similarly not that problematic. But I'm not
sure, does that parallel make sense?

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net