RE: GPL vs non-GPL device drivers

From: Bernd Petrovitsch
Date: Fri Feb 16 2007 - 06:51:55 EST


On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 03:42 -0800, David Schwartz wrote:
[...]
> Not quite. Copyright is: This particular implementation is mine, but you are
> free to implement any idea any *other* way you want. You simply can't
> implement an idea precisely the way I did it, but all ideas are open to you.

Actually you can legally (at least/even with author's rights hereover).
But it will be very hard to convince a judge and/or lawyers that you
didn't actually copy it.

And the question is moot anyways since it is extremely unlikely you end
up with the same implementation for the same problem (unless the problem
is small/simple/trivial enough like "binary search in a sorted array on
int's").

Bernd
--
Firmix Software GmbH http://www.firmix.at/
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