*BSD News Article 68306


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From: jstern@Primenet.Com (Josh Stern)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX)
Date: 11 May 1996 13:38:02 -0700
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Peter Berger <peterb@hoopoe.psc.edu> wrote:
>"Thumper!" <thumper@vfr.interceptor.com> writes:

>> > In general, this is incorrect.  If you don't want someone to be able to
>> > legally reverse engineer your product, you've got to get them to
>> > contractually agree to not reverse engineer it.  

>> That would sadly imply that software is unprotectable.  Commercial software, GNU, 
>> GPL, etc, are meaningless, because it's therefore legal to take someone's product, 
>> take it apart to see how it works, and then derive your own work partially, or even 
>> entirely, from that work, and proceed to legally sell your own work.  

"Meaningless" is much too strong.  It's a lot of work to rewrite
a large program.  If the large program is already freely available
then it would only be worth it to do this in special circumstances.
Suppose someone wanted to sell their rewrite?  They would probably
need to add a lot of improvements, even after rewriting the
original, in order to achieve high sales, since the original
is freely available, and the original source is also available
to be improved by someone else.

Consider Emacs for example.  There are commercial rewrites
around, they just are not very widely used.

>Welcome to the Dirty Little Truth that GPL advocates don't like to talk about.
>
>It doesn't mean that "software is unprotectable."  It means that
>software is only protectable to the extent it is copyrighted,
>patented, or protected by a contractual agreement.
>
>It's perfectly fine for me to take apart your product, see how it
>works, and then use the -information- I gather in my own product.
>Now, I can't -copy- your -expression- (ie, your source code) because
>that is protected by copyright.  But I can certainly copy your ideas
>with impunity. 

Is that a "Dirty Little Truth"?  Gee, I always thought that
was part of *the point* of GPL - the user of GPL'ed code
is explicitly prevented from taking that code and putting
a fence around it that would prevent others from learning
about the original and its workings.  


- Josh



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