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mayank

> This judgment could have had devastating consequences and turned software development into a copyright nightmare.

It’d sure have made the practice of taking someone else’s API and re-implementing the innards a lot more interesting:

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Object/Tasks/s3co...

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The WINE and ReactOS guys must be cheering!

It's a win for all open software. Torvalds and Stallman didn't ask Bell's permission before re-implementing Unix

Why was this comment downvoted? Does GNU/Linux not largely reimplement proprietary Unix?

Yes why? Doesn't it?

It does. There are some who would argue that the Linux copyright fight is already resolved because of the SCO suits, but that's wrong because

A: some of those suits are still ongoing, and

B: the suits never alleged infringement based on the API alone, SCO was claiming that Linux copied functional code in multiprocessing modules (we don't know which functions because they demand secrecy, even though it's open source).

Not even SCO, trolls that they are, were insane enough to claim that the APIs themselves are copyrighted.

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