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From: cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: "Gosling-free" emacs and unipress
Message-ID: <420@kontron.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 26-Jul-85 18:48:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: kontron.420
Posted: Fri Jul 26 18:48:30 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 31-Jul-85 03:57:16 EDT
References: <3134@decwrl.UUCP> <3232@cornell.UUCP>
Organization: Kontron Electronics, Irvine, CA
Lines: 29

> In article <3134@decwrl.UUCP> kolling@decwrl.UUCP (Karen Kolling) writes:
> >
> >    Unipress told me that they . . . are
> >"reserving the right to sue if people use this version, because Stallman
> >wrote it looking at Gosling's code."
> 
> Note that copyright law provides NO protection for the algorithms or ideas
> contained in a block of code, but only for the instantiation.  Thus, the
> fact that RMS looked at any copyrighted code is totally irrelevant; the only
> question is whether any of code (possibly modified by some mechanical
> translation process like reformatting or identifier substitution) from the
> Gosling version and not available from any public domain source was included.
> Trade secrets are different, of course, but noone has claimed trade secret 
> protection for the Gosling code.
> 
My understanding of the copyright law is substantially in agreement with
the above statement; I wonder why it is that many software developers
are concerned about the issue of "Did Mr. A look at Mr. B's code?"  I
attended a GEM ISV Seminar at Digital Research some months back, and the
software developers mentioned that they were told specifically to avoid
looking at *ANYTHING* related to the Macintosh code; I assumed that this
was to avoid legal problems.  A few months back, IBM sued one of the
compatible makers (I think it was Tava) over BIOS ROM copyright infringement.
Part of the agreement that settled the suit was that the new BIOS for the
compatible would be written by software engineers who had not looked at
the IBM BIOS.  

Anyone know why everyone is so concerned about code written after
inspecting someone else's code?