Copyright issues

1

I’m sorry if this question has been answered before, but I’m just concerned of this project’s future.

Since Haiku copies it’s API&ABI (among other things) straight from BeOS isn’t it possible that the same firm that made Be bankrupt or the company now in possession of Be’s intellectual property might someday have an issue with Haiku.

When it comes to Microsoft, they have never wanted to monopolize the market, they want to be the only player around. When BeOS was ported from PPC to Intel architecture Microsoft noticed that they had a rival and the rival even (to be totally honest) had a far better product for the desktop market than Microsoft or even Apple (at the time) had. Microsoft has been trying to kill linux since the late 90’s and considering the amount of people using linux at the time that seemed like a bit of an over reaction. They have finally - albeit - silently admitted that they can’t kill linux since it’s an ideology. Haiku on the other hand will be a serious alternative to linux/windows in ~4 years and undoubtedly Microsoft or some other company will try to attack it at some point.

I guess this issue has been resolved already, but I would appreciate if someone would shed some light on this matter and explain to a business illiterate person if this concern is in vain.

2

I will leave others to reply, but I don’t think you have to worry about ACCESS Co. Ltd(they own beos these days) finding out. As legacy documentation for haiku has been provided by ACCESS Co. Ltd.

3

I’m not an expert on this but I think that the API files(.h) are of a public licens and will be ok as long as we don’t change that licens on those files.

4

Furthermore, copying an API is not actually copyright violation… but copying the actual files without permission would be.

You can type up a header representing the same API and it becomes your own copyrighted work at that point, even if it does the same thing.

With public header files, it’s somewhat difficult to prove that they’re not just copied directly, as they’re basically public information, and they honestly can’t be written in many different ways intentionally. However, the fact that they’re public headers in the first place often indicates that they can be copied as long as the copyright notice remains intact.

I’m pretty sure there’s nothing to worry about, ACCESS has come as close as possible to giving Haiku an official blessing - they have even granted Haiku the right to redistribute their copyrighted BeBook documentation under a CC license:

http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/