Hitchikers Guide to Porting Phobos / D Runtime to other architectures

[Joakim]

On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 00:02:22 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 20:16:14 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
> wrote:
>> On 2014-01-09 19:39, Sean Kelly wrote:
>>
>>> I do think we may need to stick with manually written headers 
>>> though, as much for copyright reasons as anything.
>>
>> Why not an automatic solution? Why would the copyright matter 
>> if it's manually or automatically translated?
>
> Because of this clause from the Boost license page:
>
> "The conceptual interface to a library isn't covered. The
> particular representation expressed in the header is covered, as
> is the documentation, examples, test programs, and all the other
> material that goes with the library. A different implementation
> is free to use the same logical interface, however. Interface
> issues have been fought out in court several times; ask a lawyer
> for details."
>
> I suspect that an automatic translation might be subject to the
> "representation" issue, while a manual rewrite should not.

IANAL and I agree that this may be a somewhat legally murky 
topic, but Android extensively uses automatically translated 
headers and I don't think it has caused them much of a problem.  
Well, other than that whole Java mess with Oracle, ;) which 
Google won. I count 632 header files in the platform headers that 
I'm using for Android/x86 that contain the following notice:

  ***   This header was automatically generated from a Linux 
kernel header
  ***   of the same name, to make information necessary for 
userspace to
  ***   call into the kernel available to libc.  It contains only 
constants,
  ***   structures, and macros generated from the original header, 
and thus,
  ***   contains no copyrightable information.