[Theora] Independent implementations?

[Ralph Giles]

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On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 06:16:49PM +0200, Maik Merten wrote:

> If I understand correctly only On2 has the right to change the licencse.
> If Xiph did this without permission the source in SVN would clearly
> (well... IANAL) be illegal. I am very confident Xiph asked for permission.

Of course it was legal to change the license. It's not that we asked
permission; the donation included a transfer of copyright, so as the
owners, the Xiph.org Foundation had every right to license it as we
did. That's why the theora files all have a Xiph.org copyright header,
rather than On2.

> I don??t think I am mixing copyright and patents. I simply had the
> strange idea that using a document directly derived from source code
> will make your own implementation a derivation of that source code.

Bit of a grey area. In the US this approach was used successfully to
create 'clean room' re-implementations of e.g. the PC BIOS before the
DMCA.

-r