On Jan 15, 2008 6:16 AM, Michael Van Canneyt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The initial accusations were published on a Blog of some former > Borland employee or afficionado. He contacted codegear, apparently, > and then a codegear official (Alan Bauer) contacted some of the > FPC team members by private email.
A google search turned up the blogger in question, and these two articles: http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/IWishTheDelphiCommandLineCompilerWereFree.aspx http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/CopyrightAndTheFreePascalProject.aspx He worked at Borland for 15 years, and CodeGear the last couple of those, but works for a new company now with 4 other ex-CodeGear employees. Again, I'm late to the party, so this has probably already been mentioned before on the list, but from some of his comments it is apparent that he came to his conclusions as to the copyright issue at the beginning of last year while still at CodeGear. I think it's interesting that he never raised those issues then. It is also clear that he has no clue about copyright law. It seems he believes that if a unit does the same thing in the same way as another copyrighted unit, there is a copyright violation somewhere involved. You can't copyright an algorithm (and there's still an ongoing debate about whether it's actually proper to patent one, although the USPTO does it all the time now). But it doesn't help when someone is blowing smoke into an already cloudy issue. Judging from the posts in this thread, it does seem that the FPC team found some code after their review that needed fixing, and I'm glad that's mostly been finished. However, it does concern me that the LCL team hasn't performed the same kind of in-house analysis on their code yet. Until they do, I'm afraid this issue won't go away anytime soon. _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
