From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264940AbTLWEug (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 Dec 2003 23:50:36 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S264941AbTLWEug (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 Dec 2003 23:50:36 -0500 Received: from mail.webmaster.com ([216.152.64.131]:48369 "EHLO shell.webmaster.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S264940AbTLWEuf (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 Dec 2003 23:50:35 -0500 From: "David Schwartz" To: "Stan Bubrouski" , Subject: RE: SCO's infringing files list Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 20:50:19 -0800 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.6604 (9.0.2911.0) In-Reply-To: <1072125736.1286.170.camel@duergar> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2055 Importance: Normal Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org These files seem to mostly include information from standards documents and most likely contain insufficient original creative content to justify copyright protection. The particular order in which one lists the defines or the numbers one assigns to them don't seem to be protectable to me, there's no expression in them. I had a similar issue in a code review. In this case, the relevant RFC actually named the constants and gave their numerical values. The numerical values are used in the protocol and it's logical for multiple independent groups to both choose to use the same names used in the RFC. So our code had one header file -- a list of '#define's with the same names and numbers as someone else's code (and the same as the RFC, of course). And guess what, we both put them in numerical order too! Not bothering to look at the RFC, the code reviewer concluded that the identical symbol names must have meant one of us took code from the other. Duh. DS