--- robert burrell donkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wednesday, June 4, 2003, at 01:26 AM, Phil Steitz wrote: > > 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. > OK. I get it. It may be difficult, however, to decide what qualifies as "strikingly similar" and when we need to worry. I guess we will cross that bridge when we come to it and hopefully it won't be too big of a distraction. Hopefully as well, our reviewers (and ourselves) will also be verifying correctness and stability -- making the whole thing a value-added activity :-)
> - robert > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
