

Programming languages 'do not enjoy copyright protection,' EU court says - potomak
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57426822-92/programming-languages-do-not-enjoy-copyright-protection-eu-court-says/

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altrego99
In my business I need to work with SAS. So let me offer some personal opinions
what it really is. It's one of those things where I fail to understand why
corporates still choose to spend money on.

As a "programing language" it's ridiculously easy to recreate with simple
(though occasionally inconsistent) C like syntax. It is sold as a statistical
analysis framework. While it can do regression fine, you have to pay
additional money to get features like support for decision trees, and still it
does not support the proven machine learning techniques (Random Forest, SVMs).

I think SAS is a dinosaur existing because of its legacy hold, trying to
desperately grab the last straws - like these lawsuits, and writing
disparaging papers comparing SAS with free alternatives like MapReduce & R.

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pella
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3918443>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3918912>

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tomrod
Strange. I could see implementations not being patentable, but the creation of
a programming language could and should be copyrightable as a whole, not as
individual pieces. Python is usable, whereas LolCats exists mainly as
expression. But I'm not a programmer--what do y'all think?

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exDM69
This would put us in a situation where we would have lawyers comparing
programming languages and assessing their novelty w.r.t. intellectual property
violations. We do _not_ want to get into this situation. It might end up in a
situation where two languages are similar on the inside but there's a minor
change to make it incompatible but non-infringing. Not ideal.

Many programming languages are very similar to each other and it's very hard
to differentiate. Python, Perl, Lua and Ruby are very similar on the inside,
despite their syntactic differences. If one of them was patented or
copyrighted, it could hinder the others.

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tomrod
I agree with what you're saying. Does my point make sense?

some clarification here:

I'm saying copyright the entire item, which to me means the syntax. The
implementation ought not to be patentable due to prior art. I mean, Lovelace,
Church, Turing, Gauss and Euclid have never been paid royalties for building
the foundation on which computing lies. Why should Oracle be thus complicated.

~~~
exDM69
> I'm saying copyright the entire item, which to me means the syntax.

A programming language is so much more than just the syntax. The syntax is
only skin-deep, what matters (and where the differences are) is the semantics
of the language.

The problem in copyrighting the syntax of a language is that it's very trivial
to whip up another syntax. For example, JavaScript has the regular syntax but
you can also write JavaScript using the CoffeeScript or ParenScript syntax
while having the same semantics.

So if someone were to copyright a language syntax, it would be very easy to
write an almost compatible language with a minor change to the syntax. The new
language would be (source level) incompatible, but in essence it would be the
same thing. The only reason for adding this incompatibility would be to avoid
IP restrictions.

That's what we don't want, similar but incompatible languages with the only
motivation being keeping lawyers happy.

