Re: Informations about JiffyDOS

From: Nicolas Welte (welte_at_chemie.uni-konstanz.de)
Date: 2001-03-16 10:40:55

ncoplin@orbeng.com wrote:
> >How could one possibly copy the code?  It's for a different hardware.
> >Copyright doesn't cover ideas or algorithms; it only covers the way they
> >are presented.
> Copyright includes code snippets, not just the whole thing verbatum... so
> you'd have to re-code the detection methods etc (ie waiting for the 1541 to
> pull data low in between after transmission of bit6 under ATN, etc)

I think to make a perfectly legal version of Jiffy-DOS for the VIC-20 and
C264 series, some sort of clean-room technique should be used: one person or
group disassembles Jiffy-DOS 64 (or uses the disassemblies on the web) and
creates a description of the communication protocol. A second person or
group, who never read the disassembly, will implement this back into code. 

But on the other hand, why not take the code fragments and adapt them for the
different hardware and just put the thing onto the web somewhere? I'm sure
CMD wouldn't care too much, nor would they suffer any financial losses
through the free distribution of VIC-20 and 264 series versions of Jiffydos.
After all, it isn't very difficult to find Jiffy for the 64 and 1541, thanks
to emulator ROM sites.

Of course it is a different case for 64HDD, which you maybe want to
distribute commercially with Jiffydos technology. In this case that
clean-room approach might be necessary, but since you probably analyzed the
Jiffy ROMs already yourself, you can't implement it back into code yourself.
You won't be able to prove that you didn't take code from the original
source. Maybe it's best to ask them if they will allow you to do it anyway,
who knows?

Nicolas
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