Disputes over Derivative Works
I left for last the most difficult legal question facing the open source software industry: What is a “derivative work” of software?
If an open source license doesn't have a reciprocity condition, derivative works simply don't cause problems. You can safely ignore this topic entirely if you license software under an academic open source license.
Early in this book I explained the complex problem of separating expressions from ideas, art from science, and right brain from left brain creations. To determine whether a software program is a derivative work of another software program, the courts need to disentangle these abstractions. The procedure that many courts use, called the abstraction-filtration-comparison
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