[OpenAFS-devel] IBM public license code (from OpenAFS) in samba/examples/nss ok?

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:


> of building interoperable implementations like Arla.  I have been and expect 
> to continue to be able to use the results of that work.  And, there is 
> actually quite a bit of published textual documentation, though some of it is 
> rather old.

And more importantly, it's free: it was written under DOD contract and 
thus is not encumbered.

>
> But most important is this point - copyrights do not protect ideas and 
> information; they protect the _expression_ of ideas and information.  I can't 
> copy ptopcodes.h, but I _can_ tell you what the opcode is for each RPC.  And 
> in fact, what I do is generate headers mechanically from the registry tables 
> (so, the work in generating PR_ops.h is entirely in writing down the registry 
> table, which hasn't been done yet for this particular registry).
>
> Similarly, I can write documentation describing the ptserver RPC protocol, 
> including telling you what all the RPC's do, what their names are, and what 
> the types of their arguments are.  I just can't copy text from IBM's 
> documentation or code.