Re: Question about Cocoa/Gnustep

[Jeff Teunissen]

Gregory John Casamento wrote:

> --- "Y. J. Chun" <yjchun@mac.com> wrote:
>
> > On Apr 23, 2004, at 11:25 PM, Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> >
> > > There is much precedent in both US and European court decisions
> > > which state that an API (like Cocoa, Win32, DOS, etc, etc) cannot be
> > > copyrighted.
> >
> > What about header files? API is mostly defined in header files and it
> > is inevitable that header files would look similiar from
> > implementation to implementation. Is it possible if, suppose i'm
> > developing my own another OpenStep impl., I legally copy apple's
> > header file and modify them?
> 
> Don't do that.   It's certainly illegal to do a *straight* copy.   The
> headers in GNUstep have been created by utilizing the documentation in
> the spec and other Cocoa documentation as a reference.

Try not to use the word "illegal" when discussing potential or actual
copyright infringement, unless it is a _criminal_ infringement, which is
indeed illegal.

Sorry, people throw that word around a lot when it's wholly inappropriate.

In most cases, it's not illegal to "violate" (infringe) someone's copyright
-- it remains a civil matter. You can be sued over it, but in most cases
you're not going to jail (as might be the case if you're selling, for
profit, unauthorized copies of a work).

[snip]

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
| GPG: 1024D/9840105A   7102 808A 7733 C2F3 097B  161B 9222 DAB8 9840 105A
| Core developer, The QuakeForge Project        http://www.quakeforge.net/
| Specializing in Debian GNU/Linux              http://www.d2dc.net/~deek/