Peter Gordon wrote:
On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 20:20 -0700, grumpy wrote:
Linux is a reverse engineered variant of UNIX or was originally
That's why Linus wrote it he couldn't afford a Unix licnse
No it wasn't reverse-engineered. It was built based on POSIX and other
specifications (like Single Unix) that was able to obtain, plus his
experiences with using SunOS (now Solaris) at the University of
Helsinki, where he was a student.
Yes and "clean room" reverse engineering that Grumpy is thinking about
is done to protect against claims of copyright infringment only.
Basically you want to be able to show that even if there are substantial
similarities in your implementation and the original, it is genuine
coincidence and was rewritten from scratch, ie, the implementation was
NOT copied.
As somebody else said patents blow through any effort to not tread on
them. If your implementation is like the one described in the patent,
you are in trouble, doesn't matter how you got there or if you invented
it yourself. This is all you need to conclude patents are a chokehold
on innvoation IMO. The fact that if you knew there was a patent you are
violating can get the patentholder triple damages (count 'em) is just
the bankrupting icing on the cake.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3500546
-Andy
