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

[Derrick Brashear]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net> wrote:
> 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.

In general this practice is called a "whiteroom implementation", e.g.
you had a description and went into a bare white room and did it
again.