On 25/07/12 16:06, John Floren wrote:
(snip)
> Just write the code, nobody cares. The manual pages define an
> interface, and you're going to implement it. The manual pages are
> copyrighted, sure, because they're written works and are automatically
> protected by copyright. Besides the recent Google vs. Oracle fiasco, I
> can't think of a time an open-source project had legal problems by
> writing new code to implement an API. And, based on a brief reading of
> http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1202.pdf, it looks as though a
> US judge has ruled that an API is not subject to copyright; if you
> implement the 9P API, you should be fine. Also, since you're doing a
> free reimplementation of code which is currently available free to
> everyone by the creators (Lucent), I have a hard time figuring out
> exactly what basis they'd have for a lawsuit. john
Hi John - thanks for that.
Thanks also to everyone who has commented in this thread - you've been
very helpful!  This is one of the most helpful lists that I've been on.
This feedback is very useful as a guide to how to proceed.

Although I'm not running Plan 9 at present (I'm on Linux), I'm very
impressed with its elegance. Everything from kbdfs to the plumber to the
Venti filesystem - it's all beautifully thought-out.  The way that Venti
uses SHA1 hashes to store data reminds me a lot of Git (which I also
really like - there's another elegantly designed bit of software).
Thanks again, all - bye for now :)
- Andy