Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 21:15 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0607271402230.4168@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0607272239050.29667@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> 
> 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.

That is definitely not true. Translation does not take away anything from the copyright. If I write a book in English, and you translate it to German, _I_ remain the copyright holder, and you need my permission to distribute the result. The fact that you translated it means nothing, and you don't own it as a result.

Similarly, the fact that I and others hold the copyright on the source code very much means that we also hold the copyright on any binaries you "translate" that source code into, and the only thing that gives you a right to distribute those binaries is not the translation phase, but the fact that the GPLv2 allows you to distribute binaries (with certain requirements, of course).

Now, on the other hand it's certainly true that certain elements are potentially uncopyrightable. If there is effectively only one sane or common way to actually write a git object to disk, the fact that your code ends up looking very similar in Java to the way it is done in the original C does not imply any copyright problems at all.

But that doesn't mean that you can take the C code and just rewrite it as Java - it was still copyright protected. It just means that if your Java code ends up looking like the C code, you can explain why it happened.

Now, some things have _no_ copyright protection at all, at least in certain areas. Facts and things that did not involve any artistic expression at all are simply not copyrightable. So if you list the first million digits of PI, you can't complain if somebody copies them, for example.

(But in some places, you can apparently claim that you "spent effort" on gathering those digits of PI, and that others would have to spend that same effort rather than copy your end result. I suspect that's a very weak argument, but I suspect that there have been worse arguments made in front of a judge in, say, places like Utah, to pick a random one).

And as usual, tech people talking legal issues is not very sane. So talk to a lawyer if you really care.

			Linus