> Wouldn't contributing a patch to be read by the person who will be > solving the problem, but without transferring of rights, introduce risk > or liability for the FSF and GCC? > > I thought "clean room implementation" implies not seeing how somebody > else did it first, as the "clean" part is tainted after somebody > examines the patch?
That's true, but is much less of a risk than actually integrating the patch into a codebase. There's already a level of indirection here in any infringement and the code WAS posted to a public list. I'm shortening a complex concept here, but when you want to see if an item infringes on a copyrighted item, you are entitled to look at each level of abstraction independently. When you have the sort of infringement you're talking about above, it's occuring at a higher level of abstraction than code and most GCC patches have little protectable content at that level. But indeed people DO have to be careful in how much they look at patches from people who don't have assignments, especially if the patch is very large and has a lot of nontrivial stuff in it.
