Re: [Help-glpk] How did you rewrite the cplex API?

[Robbie Morrison]

Hi Christophe-Marie, Xypron, Andrew, all

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To:           Andrew Makhorin <address@hidden>
Subject:      Re: [Help-glpk] How did you rewrite the cplex API?
Message-ID: 
<address@hidden>
From:         Christophe-Marie Duquesne <address@hidden>
Date:         Mon, 9 Jul 2012 01:01:26 +0200
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> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 9:48 PM, glpk xypron <address@hidden> wrote:
>> whether API definitions are copyrightable has been
>> subject to legal disputes.
>
> I am a single developper versus a large corporation,
> and I can't afford a lawyer. I'd rather not taking
> any risk here :)

As an observation, it seems that open source is not
subject to the same degree of intellectual property
combat that epitomizes the IT corporates.  For instance,
Apple versus Samsung on smart phone design.

I've sometimes wondered why that might be.  I guess
that the open source world is normally too diffuse and
too impoverished to bother with and that most open
source projects pose little or no threat to commercial
products.

The SCO debacle was, of course, an exception.
I followed these events quite closely because
I developed on SCO UnixWare for some years -- SCO
eventually went bankrupt:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group#Legal_battles

I'm not suggesting that the open source community
flout intellectual property law, but the actual risks of
getting it wrong are probably close to negligible.

That said, I make sure everything I use is clean.

Robbie
---
Robbie Morrison
PhD student -- policy-oriented energy system simulation
Technical University of Berlin (TU-Berlin), Germany
University email (redirected) : address@hidden
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