lars@spectrum.CMC.COM (Lars Poulsen) (03/09/91)
In article <steveh.667927814@tasman> steveh@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (Steven Howell) writes: > I have designed a Mac II from A iifx memory map. >Using hardware diffrent to apples, I have placed together a mac iifx >compatible hardware combination. >I have ensured that apples roms will NOT plug in and >make it apple fx compatible. > >The question is is it worthing paying a 68040 programmer to write a os >system to patch apples operating roms to mine. its in the area of >$2000 in Australia. What i would like to know is if I can be sued >even though the software is diffrent and the hardware diffrent, but >still does EXACTLY the same job. (1) Can you get sued ? You bet. American companies will sue anyone if they think they can derive even a temporary benefit. If they could force you to spend a half million dollars defending yourself from a frivolous lawsuit, would it be to their benefit ? Yes. (2) Would a suit have merit, or would it be thrown out of court ? The operative phrase here is "derivative work". Did you derive your product from Apple's copyrighted material ? It sounds to me like the answer is YES. You intend to take Apple's ROM and patch it around the edges. (3) Is there a way to legally make a clone ? In order for a clone to not be a derivative work, it is necessary that the people that implement it should not have seen the copyrighted code. The companies that opened the world to IBM-PC clones defined a "clean room" procedure to ensure this. Two software teams worked in parallel. One team - the dirty team - developed a functional specification for the code. In other words, they reverse engineered a description of what the code must do to be an acceptable plug-in replacement. The other team - the clean team, which consisted entirely of programmers with no knowledge of the copyrighted code - implemented code according to the specifications. The dirty team then tested the resulting code, and whenever it was found to not work as required, defined the problem as a specification error, and amended the specification to cover the problem area. The clean team then amended the product. All communication between the two teams was formal and written to ensure that no "forbidden" knowledge of the copyrighted software was imparted to the clean team. I believe that DEC used a similar approach to develop OSF/1 software untainted by ATT Unix copyrights. This meant hiring systems programmers that had never seen Unix source code !! Clean room development is EXPENSIVE. Note, that if you develop in a clean room, there is no reason to insert gratuitous incompatibilities: They become IRRELEVANT. -- / Lars Poulsen, SMTS Software Engineer CMC Rockwell lars@CMC.COM
breidenb@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Oliver Breidenbach) (03/10/91)
hi, is that the same way IBM developed AIX (two teams, one never seen a piece of UNIX)? That would explain why it's such a nasty messy thing. A UNIX written by people straight from university without any experience in writing software? They should be sued on violation of human rights to the benefit of all mankind. (Just my opinion). Oliver.
n67786@cc.tut.fi (Tero Nieminen) (03/12/91)
In article <1991Mar10.091521.18978@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE> breidenb@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Oliver Breidenbach) writes:
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hi,
is that the same way IBM developed AIX (two teams, one never seen a piece
of UNIX)? That would explain why it's such a nasty messy thing.
A UNIX written by people straight from university without any experience
in writing software? They should be sued on violation of human rights to
the benefit of all mankind. (Just my opinion).
Oliver.
Harly that, but you see, you can buy the unix source licence for a
"reasonable" price. And practically all unixes running today have some
copyrigtrd code in them (MACH and GNU are still to be released).
Just my two cents worth..
--
Tero Nieminen Tampere University of Technology
n67786@cc.tut.fi Tampere, Finland, Europe