site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com On 22 Nov 2008, at 22:17, Conrad G T Yoder wrote: Your best best is to speak to an independent attorney who is familiar with software law. Jonas _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... As has been mentioned, you are not going to get sound legal advice on a technical list. If you contact Apple's legal team/DTS, you are going to get legal advice that is in Apple's best interest, which may or may not be helpful for your situation. The problem is that I'm not getting any advice whatsoever from them (which is why I sent this question to this list). I don't mind getting a "no" (I'd prefer a "yes" to a "no", but also a "no" to no answer). I just want to know where I stand and to what extent it is worth to spend my time on Mac OS X/iPhone support (such as figuring out a way to run our 4600+ regression tests on that thing without the ability to remotely login). The problem is not really software law. APIs have been ruled as uncopyrighteable in the past (http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201801579 ). Since this header is however distributed as part of the iPhone SDK, it's obviously subject to the terms of the iPhone SDK agreement (which I accepted when I downloaded it). And that's basically a contract, and that contract says that you cannot distribute derivative works based on the SDK, except where the files are licensed under an open source/ free software license which does allow it (although I'm not sure whether I'm even allowed to say this, because the contents of the original NDA itself were also under NDA; I haven't checked whether this condition was lifted together with the NDA on info in published releases of the SDK). But even if my hypothetical independent attorney could interpret that agreement as allowing the distribution of a derivate of that header, then if Apple's lawyers disagreed it would help me nothing (since I sure as hell am not prepared for nor interested in a court battle with Apple's legal department). An independent lawyer could at best tell me whether there is a high or low chance whether Apple's lawyer would agree with one or other interpretation. Which is not a great deal when you consider that I do all this work for free. The kicker is of course that in practice, Apple's legal department probably couldn't care less about what I actually do in this case (and all this whining will probably at most expedite a negative answer). That's of course logical in a sense, as it's not like my work will make or break Apple in any way; commercially, it only influences a number of smaller Mac companies with (often legacy) Pascal code, and some others that are porting Delphi/Win32 apps to Mac OS X. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com