Re: gEDA-user: gEDA vs commercial product

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 08:13 -0700, Harry Eaton wrote:
> --- Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Does anyone care to comment / speculate how much a
> > standard can cover by
> > Copyright? Whether symbols looking similar (or the
> > same, even) are in
> > breach of Copyright? If one symbol on its own isn't,
> > is there some
> > "literary work" in the database (ie. the list of
> > symbols). It would be
> > very difficult to reproduce a library of symbols
> > without copying or
> > referring to that.
> 
> The scenes a faire doctrine should allow a free
> implementation of something similar. However given
> that the IEC is litigous, it would probably mean a
> court fight including an appeal. I would expect to win
> in the  end provided the symbols just looked really
> similar and weren't actually coppied, but who wants to
> pay for the fight.
> 
> See http://www.ivanhoffman.com/scenes.html for more
> info on the doctrine.

That is interesting, but if we were seeking "compatibility" with the
IEC's symbols, ie. for each IEC symbol, we would have one which was
similar, then we're not just considering the symbols themselves, but the
_list_ of symbols in the standard (also potentially Copyright?)

It might also be difficult if we wanted to get the naming of the symbols
similar.

On the other hand, people who produce "Wine" (windows emulator) are able
to "copy" Microsoft APIs definitions, for purposes of compatibility.
They can't copy the header files from Microsoft products, but
essentially, the naming and content of the prototypes are the same.

I've not been able to find anything about this in my superficial scan on
the net, but the header files do (I presume - to serve their purpose)
contain the same naming, constants as the Microsoft headers.

Does the list of symbols in the IEC 60617 standard fall into a similar
category, or can't we reverse-engineer "standards" for compatibility?

Peter C




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