robert burrell donkin wrote:
<snip>
the second is that we're going to need to audit our implementations against copyrighted ones. (i'm hoping that some better qualified folks might volunteer for this.) if we find any that are too similar, then we should use apache development resources to create fresh clean room implementations.
I don't understand exactly what you mean here. It might be difficult to find people with the combined legal and math skills to "audit" the code for copyright infringement. What did you have in mind here?
i'm not sure that legal skills are actually necessary. i have a couple of reasons for this:
1. once we've worked out collectively what we think is right, one of the committers will contact the ASF legal team and ask them to check that what we intend to do will offer sufficient protection to everyone.
2. it's not possible to have absolute protection against litigation on the wide world of the world wide web (are there any lawyers who know the law in every jurisdiction?). usually, acting responsibly and with due care is usually good enough.
what i had in mind was people with knowledge of existing algorithms (like Al Chou and David Neuer) keeping an eye on the source and alerting us to anything that seems too similar to existing implementations. IMHO what would be ideal would be for volunteers to check our implementations against the most common copyrighted implementations to make sure they are not strikingly similar.
- robert
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