namespace protection compatible with the OSD?

Dave J Woolley david.woolley at bts.co.uk
Fri Apr 20 17:54:39 UTC 2001


> From:	Dave Gilbert [SMTP:gilbertd at treblig.org]
> 
> It is unreasonable:
>   1) To say that no one is able to write a function with a particular name
>   2) That no one else is able to reimplement a function with a given name.
> 
[DJW:]  Adobe purport to do something like this to protect
the integrity of PDF and PostScript, by claiming copyright
on the operator names and data structures in PDF and PostScript.
E.g., see section 1.6 in the version 1.1 PDF reference (probably
the same in later versions).

Adobe then give permissions that allow the creation of PDF files
and also allow the implementation of alternative PDF tools.

I seem to remember that Intel do the same for the opcode names
for their machine instructions.

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