Clojure API copyright assignment?

[Nicholas Papadonis]

There is a widely known case Oracle vs. Google on whether the syntax and API of Java can be copyrighted or if it falls under fair use. When the Clojure language specification was released the author became the copyright holder. I'm assuming the copyright holder is Rich Hickey.  Does anyone know if the copyright holder provided any license or copyright assignment that allowed others to legally use of the language?  If not, has the copyright holder considered providing such  device (MIT, Apache, GPL, etc)?

I ask because C and C++ assigned it's copyright to the ISO standards committee which makes the copyright free for all to use. Interested in Clojure's status.

Thanks,
Nick

[Hadil Sabbagh]

Clojure is covered by the Eclipse Public License 1.0.

I hope this answers your question.

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[Nicholas Papadonis]

I was not sure if the Eclipse license was only for the implementation of the interpreter / compiler, or if it covers the language API itself?

On Sunday, May 24, 2020 at 10:49:46 AM UTC-4, Hadil Sabbagh wrote:

Clojure is covered by the Eclipse Public License 1.0.

I hope this answers your question.

On May 24, 2020, at 7:32 AM, Nicholas Papadonis <nick.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:

There is a widely known case Oracle vs. Google on whether the syntax and API of Java can be copyrighted or if it falls under fair use. When the Clojure language specification was released the author became the copyright holder. I'm assuming the copyright holder is Rich Hickey.  Does anyone know if the copyright holder provided any license or copyright assignment that allowed others to legally use of the language?  If not, has the copyright holder considered providing such  device (MIT, Apache, GPL, etc)?

I ask because C and C++ assigned it's copyright to the ISO standards committee which makes the copyright free for all to use. Interested in Clojure's status.

Thanks,
Nick

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[Andy Fingerhut]

The implementation of Clojure on the JVM, and of ClojureScript, were both initially written by Rich Hickey, and he released their implementations under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0.  It says so in the first couple of sentences of the readme here: https://github.com/clojure/clojure/

For ClojureScript, it says so in the last few sentences of the ClojureScript README here: https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript

All contributions by others since then have been under a contributor's agreement that assigns joint copyright of those contributions to Rich Hickey, and the author, and all later versions have been released under the same EPL v1.0 license.  You can see the contributor agreement here: https://clojure.org/dev/contributor_agreement

That covers the implementation of Clojure and ClojureScript.

You mention a "Clojure language specification".  There is no separate specification of the Clojure language, other than its implementation and documentation published on clojure.org.

Andy

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[Andy Fingerhut]

You ask: "I was not sure if the Eclipse license was only for the implementation of the interpreter / compiler, or if it covers the language API itself?"

If you are merely curious, then I don't know the answer.

If you have a significant investment of money and/or time depending upon the answer to the question, then you should hire a good intellectual property lawyer familiar with the case law in this area in your jurisdiction, and ask them.

Are you asking: If I create an API-compatible implementation of Clojure separately from the original, can I be sued by Clojure's creator, as Google was sued by Oracle?  You can try to sue anyone for anything.  Will the case be won or lost?  I have no idea.  See above.

Is it likely that Rich Hickey wants to sue people over such a reason?  If they call the resulting thing they distribute "Clojure" in the USA, he has a trademark on that name, and might legally block you from using that name, and make you pick a different name.

There are other implementations of Clojure, or minor variations, released under different names, and as far as I know Rich Hickey has no interest in suing them.  e.g. sci, babashka

Andy

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