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Authored by: bugstomper on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 05:55 AM EDT |
"He copied it from inside his head, not from Sun"
He was working for Sun when he wrote rangeCheck the first time, so they owned
the copyright to it as a work for hire. Copyright law allows you to
independently invent something, but it is considered as infringing if it can be
shown that you were exposed to the work and then copied it from memory. Since
the original copy that he wrote belonged to Sun, he copied it from Sun, even if
the copy was in his head.
It was an easy mistake for him to make. Since rangeCheck was in Array.java in
OpenJDK, there was no reason for him to think twice about including it in the
TimSort he was writing to contribute to OpenJDK. He did not write TimSort as a
work-for-hire for Google, so he retained the copyright to TimSort itself,
donating to the JCP the right to distribute it under GPL. When he later donated
it to Android, I can see how he could have forgotten about any possible
licensing issues regarding the nine lines of rangeCheck, especially since it
wasn't intended to stay in TimSort and was later removed.
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