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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 10:06 AM EDT |
(with due apologies to Harry Enfield for nicking his line)
"Someone could give me a copy of the BSD Sockets API, as described in Plain
English, and I could use that to write an application without using any BSD code
at all.
I can't put it any clearer than that."
Someone could you give you a copy of the copyrighted BSD Sockets API
specification. Or someone might give you a copyright plain english description
of the BSD sockets API
You could write your own copyrighted implementation of that Specification
without using any BSD code at all. Sure you could give it away, but until you
did the copyright would be yours. copyright in both the source code and the
compiled binary.
You could write your own application that uses your own copyrighted
implementation of the BSD sockets library.
You would have copyright in the application, the binary and the source code
You could write your own documentation about your own library, and you would get
copyright protection for your own writings.
An API requires all three, an API is not the specification alone.
Without the user call, the library is just dead code. Without the library, the
user code is just a syntax error
Without the documentation youd be flying blind
You need all three.
(possibly you don't actually need the specification, you can reverse engineer
and write your own, Cf Compaq BIOS, but you really should not choose to do it
the difficult way).
You remind of a database programmer I once worked with who had an utter failure
to grasp exactly what the database was. All he knew was 'I write this, this
happens..", the idea of there being an actual piece of hardware, running a
particular piece of software, with systems feeding data in to it, he did not
actually grasp.
I think he just though it was pixies dust
Yes, sure from a specification you could write a userland call to a BSD socket
API without touching copyrighted code or BSD code.
What do you think happens after that? what do you think happens when your
program gets compiled? what do you think is going to happen if you don't have a
BSD socket library installed? What do you think happens when your program
actually runs?
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