xml-dev - Re: A call for open source DTDs

[matt@veosystems.com]

This is a standard reverse engineering trick that was used to make
functionally identical, but non-derivative, copied of the original IBM
BIOS.  Designers with no knowledge of IBM's source code were given a
functional spec and required to write a new version from scratch.

However, you *might* (as if I understood these things) have a problem
in that you already knew HTML 4.0.

> 
> Well, I will squelch the thread using a counterexample.  IBTWSH
> is by intention an expression of the same schema as (part of) HTML 4.0.
> However, it is an independently derived work, which I wrote based on
> my *understanding* of HTML 4.0.  If I had simply copied the W3C
> version and deleted everything which I didn't wish to include in my
> subset, it would be a derivative work, but I didn't do that.
> 
> I did, of course, verify (by hand) IBTWSH against HTML 4.0 to
> make sure it was a true subset, but that does not interfere with
> its copyright status, any more than verifying one dictionary against
> another does so, as long as portions of the verifying dictionary
> do not find their way into the verified dictionary.
> 
> -- 
> John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@ccil.org

Matthew Fuchs
matt@veosystems.com

I am, of course, not speaking for my employer


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