Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I don't really care what happens to the two principles in this case. But if use of APIs require a licence because of copyright, far more people will be affected.
All those PostScript clones will stop. Wine will be no more. there's an amazing amount of software built on the free re-implementations of APIs.
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Patent protection would be worse.
Copyrighted material can be legally reverse-engineered via clean-room code development. Patented material, it's not that easy; you can't replicate the same process with different code. Instead you have to achieve the same result via a different process. (Think: Type 1 vs TrueType.)