🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 03 Oct 98 22:20:21 GMT, philh@vision25.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt)
wrote:

>In article <6v0uut$63l$1@aziraphale.demon.co.uk>
>           mark@aziraphale.demon.co.uk "Mark Baker" writes:
>> In article <907102850snz@vision25.demon.co.uk>,
>>         philh@vision25.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt) writes:
>> 
>> > Also, no-one should be allowed to one ways of making products 
>> > interface to other products or to people, IOW such things as APIs, 
>> > GUIs, the RS232 port, etc should not be copyrightable or patentable.
>> 
>> They're not; there is nothing you can do to stop someone reverse engineering
>> them and releasing something compatible.
>
>People have patented and copyrighted various hardware and software
>interfaces, AFAIK successfully in law. For example:
>
>1. IBM patented various parts of the MCA bus, so that people could
>only make motherboards or expansion cards using it if they paid IBM
>a license fee.
>
>2. Microsoft copyrighted the <windows.h> file that contained their
>C API for Windows. If other vendors of C programming systems wanted
>to use this, they had to pay MS.
>
>> However, if you make them complex
>> enough, you can make them very difficult to reverse engineer.
>
>Making something deliberately hard for other people to make devices
>to work with should be illegal. 
>

I disagree.  First of all, it would be impossible to draw the line.
What's too difficult.  What's just difficult enough.  Try to write the
law in a way that's enforceable and makes sense.

Second, if it's too complicated, it will die under its own weight
eventually.  That's why KISS is such an important rule in engineering
and just about everything else in life.