[sane-devel] Avision.c copyrights

[m. allan noah]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Paul Fox <pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us> wrote:
> m. allan noah wrote:
>  > On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Ed Hamrick <EdHamrick at aol.com> wrote:
>  > > I've asked him to release the source code to avision.c, and
>  > > I'm waiting to see it.  I want to see how he got the Xerox
>  > > DocuMate 150 working in avision.c.  I don't have one, and
>  > > one of my customers wants to use it with VueScan.
>  > >
>  >
>  > A reasonable request, however it makes your Avision support code a
>  > derivative of of SANE, and therefore you must also release that under
>  > the GPL when a user asks for all your SANE derived code. The same
>  > would be true for any other backends that you looked at or borrowed
>  > from.
>
> "looked at"?  i don't believe that's true.  that implies there's
> some sort of unpublished trade secret in play.  copyright applies
> to expression, not concept.

you are correct. the gpl uses US copyright law to define derivative
works. This seems to allow inspection, but any copying beyond
titles/headers/formatting makes it a derivative work.

allan

>
> paul
> =---------------------
>  paul fox, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 25.3 degrees)
>
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