Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?

Andre Hedrick
2003-12-11T22:50:06Z

Rob,

> The fact you personally were off in a corner talking about little green men
> from mars is remarkably irrelevant to what I wrote to Hua Zhong (who I'm
> fairly certain is not you. His english is better.)

Gee, I love the insults. I seriously doubt you have ever paid a lawyer
to even have the knowledge to allow you to pump out the bovine piles you
are spraying in the air.

Correct, I am not a lawyer, and you admit you are not one.

I have paid lawyers for advice and some damn good ones.

Can you say the same?

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
LAD Storage Consulting Group

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Rob Landley wrote:

> On Thursday 11 December 2003 15:20, Andre Hedrick wrote:
> > Rob,
> >
> > Help me out? Who is cloning what ?
> >
> > I am talking about original works, to talking about talking somebody's
> > stuff out of the kernel, hacking it up and distributing the work as an
> > original (that is clearly a derived work).
> >
> > So your arguement is bogus, try again.
>
> If you'd read the message, you might have noticed that I was talking about why
> web browser plugins may be considered to be different from kernel modules.
>
> The fact you personally were off in a corner talking about little green men
> from mars is remarkably irrelevant to what I wrote to Hua Zhong (who I'm
> fairly certain is not you. His english is better.)
>
> I have no intention of "trying again" because I wasn't talking to you in the
> first place. (I don't find what you have to say on IP issues particularly
> interesting, and don't read the ones that aren't cc'd to me...) Neither of
> us are lawyers. The difference is that I know it.
>
> Rob
>
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Andre Hedrick
> > LAD Storage Consulting Group
> >
> > On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Rob Landley wrote:
> > > On Thursday 11 December 2003 02:11, Hua Zhong wrote:
> > > > > For one thing, the plugin was made by someone without access
> > > > > to Netscape or IE's source code, using a documented interface
> > > > > that contained sufficient information to do the job without access
> > > > > to that source code.
> > > > >
> > > > > Yes, it matters.
> > > >
> > > > _What_ matters?
> > > >
> > > > Open source? (if you write a plugin for an opensource
> > > > kernel/application, you are not plugin anymore and you are derived
> > > > work.) I am sure you don't mean it.
> > > >
> > > > Documented interface? Hey, there are sources which are the best
> > > > documentation. :-)
> > >
> > > If you write software by referring to documentation, the barrier for it
> > > being a derivative work is higher than if you write it by looking at
> > > another implementation.
> > >
> > > > Seriously, even if I accept that there is never an intent to support a
> > > > stable ABI for kernel modules, some vendor can easily claim that "we
> > > > support a stable ABI, so write kernel modules for the kernel we
> > > > distribute".
> > > >
> > > > Anything can prevent that? I cannot see GPL disallow it.
> > > >
> > > > So OK, Linus and other kernel developers never intended to provide a
> > > > stable ABI, but someone else could. The original author's intent is
> > > > never relevant anymore. This is the goodness of opensource, isn't it?
> > >
> > > Once upon a time, Compaq did a clean-room clone of IBM's BIOS. Group 1
> > > studied the original bios and wrote up a spec, and group 2 wrote a new
> > > bios from that spec, and group 1 never spoke to group 2, and all of this
> > > was extensively documented so that when IBM sued them they proved in
> > > court that their BIOS wasn't derived from IBM's. (Of course compaq used
> > > vigin programmers fresh out of college who'd never seen a PC before,
> > > which was a lot easier to do in 1983...)
> > >
> > > I didn't make this up. This was a really big deal 20 years ago. It
> > > happened, and it mattered, and people cared that they created a fresh
> > > implementation without seeing the original code, entirely from a written
> > > specification that was not a derivative work of the first implementation,
> > > so no matter how similar the second implementation was (hand-coded
> > > assembly performing the same functions on the same processor in the same
> > > amount of space), it could not be considered a derivative work.
> > >
> > > This was a strong enough defense to beat IBM's lawyers, who were trying
> > > to claim that Compaq's new BIOS WAS a derivative work...
> > >
> > > Rob
>
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