Author: William H Rogers
Date: 16:15:57 02/15/05
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John For the last 15 years I worked for a software company. The laws protecting software, at least as they were written a decade ago basically stated that there must be at least a 10% change in the total coding of a program before it can be call 'new'. I knew of one man who thought that he had found away around this by making some changes to a program and then selling it as his own. This was before he bought a compiler and then only sold the compiled version. To give you an idea as to what he thought was O.K. I will give you a brief example of what he did. On the left side below is the original code and on the right his new changes: Original Moved Renamed Subroutine A Subroutine B Subroutine X Subroutine B Subroutine C Subroutine Y Subroutine C Subroutine A Subroutine Z He did ad a new routine to the program but counld not get it to work correctly so he asked me if I could fix it. I deleted 40 lines of code and replaced them with 6 lines that did the same thing, but in doing so I recogined the program as belonging to someone else and told him so. He kept trying to deny it but at that time he was only using to software for himself so I just let it drop. It was only a year or two later that I found out that he was selling it as original and by that time I did not know where he lived anymore so I just dropped it out of mind. His thinking that as long as he moved the locations of the suibroutines and renamed them that his program was now his which we know is not so. Years later now, I am not sure if the same laws still apply to software anymore and have heard that some judges are even considering doing away with software patents completely. I don't think that they will ever succeed but it is out there in any case. Bill
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