[Development] Qt 4.8.6 Release Plans

Oswald Buddenhagen oswald.buddenhagen at digia.com
Mon Nov 4 17:23:55 CET 2013


On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 08:02:47AM -0800, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On segunda-feira, 4 de novembro de 2013 11:46:35, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > that's nonsense. any simple patch is not subject to copyright (though
> > it's still good tone to credit the investigator). and anything complex
> > enough is likely to produce a slightly different patch anyway, even
> > after seeing the other patch. that's what copyright is about in the
> > first place: protecting *creative* works.
> 
> The problem is that, once you've read their work, if you write the same 
> solution you're likely to be influenced by the original. Therefore, it's not a 
> new creative work (which copyright does allow), but a derivative work, a copy. 
>
that's still not relevant to bugfixing (which is effectively what we are
talking about), as the creativity is inherently rather constrained
(unless somebody decides that fixing the bug requires a major
refactoring and/or adding functionality). that means that the actually
creative part of the change remains way below the threshold of copyright
relevance.

of course the catch is that you can't know whether the patches are
trivial until you look at them. which leads us to this:

> So one person alone cannot do it. Two can:
> 
but "we" are big enough to be able to do a clean-room implementation,
don't you think? so the statement that "we" are not allowed to look at
the patches is simply not true.



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