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downbootstoday at 3:45 PM2 repliesview on HN

Great! Math tools for everyone.

what's stopping some Mathematica employee from taking the source code and having an agent port it. Or even reconstruction from the manual. Who owns an algorithm?

Will everything get copied eventually?


Replies

adiustoday at 4:21 PM

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor...., a software clone does not infringe software copyright. So yeah, I'd guess sooner or later everything is going be cloned …

MengerSpongetoday at 4:21 PM

> what's stopping some employee from something like Mathematica from taking the source code and having an agent port it to open source

Laws against theft. Also the same reason employees don't release the code on pastebin or something.

> Who owns an algorithm?

The org or person who was granted the software patent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent

> Will everything get copied eventually?

If we're lucky. More likely everything bitrots as technical capabilities are lost. Slowly at first, then quickly.

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