I've always viewed "clean room" design with a bit of romanticism. So I'd love to help.
Three key points of the wikipedia article: 1) However, because independent invention is not a defense against patents, clean room designs typically cannot be used to circumvent patent restrictions. 2) This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. 3) The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners. So if we want to do this, we'll have to be absolutely sure their algorithm is only protected by copyright, not patent. Then, we need to get a lawyer to oversee our process. It seems clear that this is a method to narrowly skirt copyright law -- one slipup, and we'd be in trouble. AFAIK (IANAL) Anything built on top of it would be called into question, and anybody who had the SAGE source would be in potential trouble if they wrote something similar. This would be a benefit of the SAGE Foundation -- we could hire a patent / copyright lawyer for such things. On Mon, 30 Oct 2006, Joshua Kantor wrote: > > I was at a conference this weekend where someone presented a maple > package they had been writing for doing certain differential geometry > computations. His packages is mostly independent of anything maple > specific however it does use their PDE solver intensively. This PDE > Solver is a part of maple but is implemented in their maple language > and the source is "apparently" viewable. Suppose I wanted to implement > the same capabilities in SAGE. Can I use their algorithm as the basis, > if so how much "copying" is permissable. I know that for writing > drivers for linux they are very paranoid about using a so called clean > room system where one group analyzes the drivers and writes up specs. > Then a separate group which is not allowed any contact, implements > these specs. This is to create some sort of barrier to prevent legal > action. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design > > Obviously IANAL and unfortunately NOYAL (none of you are lawyers) but > still I was curious. > > > > > Josh > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
