Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 20:51 UTC
Message-ID: <20060727205158.GE13776@pasky.or.cz>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0607272239050.29667@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

Hi,

Dear diary, on Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 10:39:55PM CEST, I got a letter where Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> said that...

> >From a standpoint of copyright (which the GPL relies on), this is not 
> possible: you cannot include C code into Java. And if it is _translated_ 
> from C into Java, it is not copyrighted any more.

  now that's a pretty strong statement - did a lawyer tell you that?
(Lawyer in what country? Germany?) Because copyrights are generally
retained over translations, otherwise I could freely publish
e.g. Czech translation of someone else's English book without any
permissions and such, which is obviously not the case.

  There has been actually similar issue with OpenTTD - it was created by
translating Transport Tycoon Deluxe assembly to C without permission of
original TTD copyright owner (not that anyone actually knows for sure
who that is, after series of company mergers and buyouts). I don't think
anyone consulted a lawyer about legality of that either but I believe
that most people agree that this is basically illegal (but most likely,
noone will ever sue, or care at all).

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
Snow falling on Perl. White noise covering line noise.
Hides all the bugs too. -- J. Putnam