[fpc-pascal] TimSort

Jonas Maebe jonas.maebe at elis.ugent.be
Tue May 24 20:08:30 CEST 2011


On 24 May 2011, at 19:53, José Mejuto wrote:

> Implementing from paper needs permission to licensing ?

Normally not.

> Is the algo
> copyrighted/patented ?

Algorithms cannot be copyrighted. Whether or not it's patented I don't know (while the individual sorting algorithms have been known for a long time, the combination may well be considered patentable by some patent office), but
a) that's unlikely, given that it was developed specifically for a free software project (unless of course someone else already patented it beforehand, and the author didn't know that)
b) pretty much any useful program you can write probably infringes on several different software patents anyway (e.g. anything using COM interfaces for cross-process communication, but that's a discussion for the fpc-other list)

Anyway: go ahead.


Jonas


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