retard schrieb:
Tue, 12 Oct 2010 10:35:03 -0700, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Tuesday, October 12, 2010 04:08:13 Simen kjaeraas wrote:
Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote:
Except that copying Tango is taboo. We want to avoid any possible
accusation of
copying Tango's code or design. There have been issues in the past
where Tango
devs thought that we might be doing that, and we just don't want to
risk any
sort of problems with the Tango folks. So, whatever we put in Phobos,
we do it
without looking at Tango.
You know, we might consider asking them for permission. That way, there
should be no problems.
That can be done, to be sure, but we definitely can't just look at their
code - or even API - and create something similar, and from what I
recall, most cases of trying to get permission have a been a problem
(primarily due to there being multiple authors, I think). If there's
only one author for the stream code in Tango, that would be easier.
Regardless, the point is that we can't just go and look at the Tango API
and use it to give ourselves ideas on what to do with Phobos.
I doubt the copyright law can protect API definitions. In that case
projects like Wine (winehq.org) couldn't exist. What do you think?
The problem is that for the windows API you don't see the implementation, so you can't have stolen
the code.
Tango's code however is available to anyone so it's a lot harder to prove that you only looked at
their API documention and not at their code.
And it's quite probable that your implementation looks similar to theirs - for standard stuff most
programmers (that may have seen any code doing something similar) will produce similar code - how do
you prove that you just did it the way that occurred natural to you and didn't copy their code?
So to be safe you have two possibilities:
1. don't model you API after Tango's
2. clone their API, look at their code and make sure yours is ridiculously
different
Else it may turn out like the SHOO time code disaster...
