On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 00:02:22 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 20:16:14 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
On 2014-01-09 19:39, Sean Kelly wrote:
I do think we may need to stick with manually written headers
though, as much for copyright reasons as anything.
Why not an automatic solution? Why would the copyright matter
if it's manually or automatically translated?
Because of this clause from the Boost license page:
"The conceptual interface to a library isn't covered. The
particular representation expressed in the header is covered, as
is the documentation, examples, test programs, and all the other
material that goes with the library. A different implementation
is free to use the same logical interface, however. Interface
issues have been fought out in court several times; ask a lawyer
for details."
I suspect that an automatic translation might be subject to the
"representation" issue, while a manual rewrite should not.
IANAL and I agree that this may be a somewhat legally murky
topic, but Android extensively uses automatically translated
headers and I don't think it has caused them much of a problem.
Well, other than that whole Java mess with Oracle, ;) which
Google won. I count 632 header files in the platform headers that
I'm using for Android/x86 that contain the following notice:
*** This header was automatically generated from a Linux
kernel header
*** of the same name, to make information necessary for
userspace to
*** call into the kernel available to libc. It contains only
constants,
*** structures, and macros generated from the original header,
and thus,
*** contains no copyrightable information.
