Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> >
> > This is a part of copyright law that eludes me - can i write a
> > replacement
> > function for something so simple that it can essentially be done in one
> > way only (like incrementing a value by one) ?
>
> Sure, if you don't cut and paste the code line by line, or retype the
> code while staring at the previous version. That is how Berkeley got
> unix-free version of the BSD operating system. However, the few places
> where they lazily copied got them in trouble.
>
I can imagine that when writing a trivial code for performing a trivial
and
well-known function it is quite possible to arrive at a result that is
virtually indistinguishable from the original.
I know that Compaq was forced to do a clean-room re-engineering of PC
BIOS
(two teams - the dirti one with access to real bios athat does
description
and testin and the clean team to write the actual code so that they can
prove they did not "steal" even if the result is byte-by-byte simila)
for
similar reasons
I guess we dont have enough provably clean developers to do it ;)
BTW, teher seems to be some problem with mailing list - I get very few
messages from the list that are not CC:d to me too
------------------
Hannu