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The trouble is
your proposed comparison would do exactly what the legal standard rejects: compare functionality. Two implementations of the same specification would come up as similar.

My favorite example is sort. I can write dozens of different implementations of gnu sort with identical external behavior, yet they're not only completely different implementations of the interface (using yacc to parse options instead of linear search, etc.) but even use different underlying sort algorithms.

The entire PC industry is founded on this distinction. If functionality were protectable in the sense you describe, there never would have been any IBM PC clones -- nor would there have been an MS-DOS (which was a direct rip on CP/M).
Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 07/22/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use
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The trouble is  Yagotta B. Kidding | 07/22/05
umm, don't think so  murph_z ZDNet Moderator | 07/22/05
Parse trees  Yagotta B. Kidding | 07/22/05
why the double standards  zzz1234567890 | 07/22/05
Isn't this a copyright-type problem?  Anton Philidor | 07/24/05
I don't know -but I doubt it  murph_z ZDNet Moderator | 07/24/05
Cloning UNIX isn't rocket science -- and neither is understanding IP law  mkedwards | 07/25/05

What do you think?

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