Re: BOCU patent (was: Re: Medievalist ligature character in the PUA)

From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Fri Dec 18 2009 - 22:14:12 CST

  • Next message: John W Kennedy: "Re: [unicode] Re: Is there a Japanese character for the word Unicode? (from Re: Unicode Haiku Contest)"

    "verdy_p" <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:

    > As this licence is signed by IBM explicitly, this just means that IBM
    > has explicitly given to everyone the right to use the ICU code part
    > related to BOCU-1, and you don't even need to ask for a permission (as
    > long as you also respect the "full conformance" required by IBM and
    > signaled in UTN#6: just base your work on ICU (even if you actually
    > don't use any part of it if everything was modified) and make sure
    > that your modifications are fully conforming, and you're ready to
    > distribute your own code immediately.

    So I'm legally OK if I want to reverse-engineer ICU code, but not if I
    want to start from scratch and read the specification and build my own?
    Wow.

    I did, in fact, design and implement and test my own fully conformant
    BOCU-1 encoder and decoder, before the legal hammer came down. I wonder
    if that code will ever see the light of day again.

    --
    Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
    RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s ­
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Dec 18 2009 - 22:16:05 CST