Ubuntu reaches out to embarrassed SuSE devs

[Andy Green]

Peter Gordon wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 20:20 -0700, grumpy wrote:
>> Linux is a reverse engineered variant of UNIX or was originally
>> That's why Linus wrote it he couldn't afford a Unix licnse
> 
> No it wasn't reverse-engineered. It was built based on POSIX and other
> specifications (like Single Unix) that was able to obtain, plus his
> experiences with using SunOS (now Solaris) at the University of
> Helsinki, where he was a student.

Yes and "clean room" reverse engineering that Grumpy is thinking about 
is done to protect against claims of copyright infringment only. 
Basically you want to be able to show that even if there are substantial 
similarities in your implementation and the original, it is genuine 
coincidence and was rewritten from scratch, ie, the implementation was 
NOT copied.

As somebody else said patents blow through any effort to not tread on 
them.  If your implementation is like the one described in the patent, 
you are in trouble, doesn't matter how you got there or if you invented 
it yourself.  This is all you need to conclude patents are a chokehold 
on innvoation IMO.  The fact that if you knew there was a patent you are 
violating can get the patentholder triple damages (count 'em) is just 
the bankrupting icing on the cake.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3500546

-Andy