Re: Unibyte characters, strings, and buffers

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
> Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 12:59:20 +0200
> 
> > IOW, I'd like to avoid the situation where others here might become
> > intimidated by what you wrote in a broader sense, and will as result
> > refrain from participating in discussions that reveal details of other
> > implementations, or from assigning their code written based on those
> > discussions.  That would cause some real damage to Emacs.
> 
> Nobody claimed that the broken copyright system does not lead to a whole
> lot of real damage to a whole lot of software development.

On this general level, I agree.  However, I only talked about a very
specific situation.  In any case, the system being broken
notwithstanding, we shouldn't see problems where none exist (yet).

> <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence,_structure_and_organization>
> may be somewhat instructional about some current court practice in the
> U.S.A.

That's the URL from which I quoted a few messages ago.

> Please note that Oracle/Google ruling is unfortunately somewhat
> atypical and on appeal (appeal hearing was in December)
> <URL:http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/googles-copyright-win-against-oracle-is-in-danger-on-appeal/>

Even if you take this article at face value (as opposed to someone
whose interests are unknown reiterating rumors), the conclusion is
that jury is still out in this issue.  Which is exactly what I wrote:
this issue is not decided yet, and precedents are contradictory.

> and that the FSF would not have been in a position to pay the kind of
> legal expenses incurred here.

If there is a precedent, you don't need to pay any expenses.

Anyway, this all is only relevant if someone of those who wrote the
code that was discussed and reimplemented actually sue the FSF.  Since
such code almost always comes from Free Software, I don't think
there's a danger of this.