On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 4:22 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
The two legal theories which would allow the use of an interface are:
- A function name or class name are not creative enough or substantial
enough to be eligible for copyright.
- A function name or class name is a small excerpt from a work, used
for the purposes of precisely referring to a larger part of the work. Such reproduction of an excerpt is fair use. This is the same legal theory which allows us to reproduce things like chapter titles and character names in Wikipedia articles about copyright novels.
I think that is disingenuous. If one considers a skin or extension to be a derived work, that is not because it uses function and class names from the original product, but because they do not have any meaning without the original code. The product, people would argue, is not "extension" but "mediawiki+extension", which clearly _is_ a derivative of mediawiki.
Line numbers are even less creative than function or class names, but if someone took a series of instructions like
* Take Mediawiki version 11.0 * In such-and-such-file replace lines so-and-so to so-and-so by (my own code) * same with several other files/lines
I would argue that what you have is a derived work from MediaWiki. Whether the same holds for extensions and skins, I would not argue from either side, not knowing enough about either the code or the legal side of the matter, but I think your rejection is too easy.