[fpc-pascal] Notice: Possible copyright infringements in FPC code base

[John Stoneham]

On Jan 15, 2008 6:16 AM, Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
> The initial accusations were published on a Blog of some former
> Borland employee or afficionado. He contacted codegear, apparently,
> and then a codegear official (Alan Bauer) contacted some of the
> FPC team members by private email.

A google search turned up the blogger in question, and these two articles:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/IWishTheDelphiCommandLineCompilerWereFree.aspx
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/CopyrightAndTheFreePascalProject.aspx

He worked at Borland for 15 years, and CodeGear the last couple of
those, but works for a new company now with 4 other ex-CodeGear
employees. Again, I'm late to the party, so this has probably already
been mentioned before on the list, but from some of his comments it is
apparent that he came to his conclusions as to the copyright issue at
the beginning of last year while still at CodeGear. I think it's
interesting that he never raised those issues then. It is also clear
that he has no clue about copyright law. It seems he believes that if
a unit does the same thing in the same way as another copyrighted
unit, there is a copyright violation somewhere involved. You can't
copyright an algorithm (and there's still an ongoing debate about
whether it's actually proper to patent one, although the USPTO does it
all the time now). But it doesn't help when someone is blowing smoke
into an already cloudy issue.

Judging from the posts in this thread, it does seem that the FPC team
found some code after their review that needed fixing, and I'm glad
that's mostly been finished. However, it does concern me that the LCL
team hasn't performed the same kind of in-house analysis on their code
yet. Until they do, I'm afraid this issue won't go away anytime soon.