| "anyone who's written a standard C library was in violation of Kernighan & Ritchie's copyright" K&R and Ken Thompson et al. were working for Bell Labs and assigned copyright to AT&T. AT&T cooperated with early open source programmers at Cal to produce UNIX software. The negotiations between Cal and AT&T produced a license from AT&T for UNIX and C as embodied in Berkeley UNIX. Berkeley BSD grants a license to anyone in the world to reproduce standard libraries and the rest of the UNIX system. Thus anyone who writes a standard UNIX library has a solid license chain back to KR&T for the APIs regardless of the result of this lawsuit. Now, the BIOS in your PC -- and the billion PC clones produced in the past 35 years -- becomes a criminal offense if the CAFC result is upheld. Quite a lot of other APIs that have been standardized under the laws as we understood them for the 50 years before CAFC reversed them soon become illegal forever. But UNIX and its various flavors is fine. Python, Perl, Ruby, C++, and C programmers should be fine as will be their standard libraries. And we'll all adapt by not using proprietary APIs from now on. You'll have to be careful about code licenses and API licenses instead of just code licenses. It's a headache and a large one-time cost to the industry in libraries we'll lose forever but in the long run it'll be fine for programmers. The real danger from the CAFC is the way they've been expanding patents. You can't escape from patents just by getting licenses or not copying others' work. |