On 15.07.2024 18:43, Bruce Perens via License-discuss wrote:
In particular, you can't copyright function call signatures, variable
names, return values, data structures, pretty much anything a software
standard would cover.
Open Source, of course, implements many APIs, standards, protocols, and
formats simply because they can't be copyrighted.
The limitations of copyright and licenses are mostly not understood at
all by programmers. This results in a lot of inapplicable terms and
often sadly humorous ones (like licenses that attempt to stop war).
I'm a little surprised that the lawyers on the channel didn't jump to
this issue right away.
It is not the point, and for sure Nate know it, else I assume he would
not "copy" the interface from Harfbuzz.
But a standard is much more then just API and structures. As we learned:
"nobody can build a network stack just reading RFC, without looking BSD
code", for this reason "reference implementation" is important (and part
of the original question), but also text and rationale. And who read
standard, could really see which one had good writers and which really
not (so artistic part is necessary not to have a dry standard). And Nate
was a writer of LWN, so I expect more on good writer team.
We can look at Unicode Standard: the text is much more than just a
standard, it has a lot of linguistic and stylistic works. For the rest
we just use the Unicode Database (which it is distributed separately).
Without such good Unicode Standard text, I doubt Unicode would be so
loved (and understood), OTOH the "Unicode" of programmers is mainly in
the dababase and in the Annexes (algorithms).
Also for this case, the boring stuffs are in OpenType specs. Font
designers interpret it in different ways, so test on the 3 main engines
is necessary (to check if the "front-end" programmers have the same
interpretation). Just an assumptions of what Nate is doing, so much more
than just an interface.
Just my interpretation: Nate is looking much more than just the standard
interface.
ciao
cate
_______________________________________________
The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not
necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the
Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address.
License-discuss mailing list
License-discuss@lists.opensource.org
http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
