Re:Linkerd: Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices
by mavelikara on Sunday February 21, 2016 @02:20PM
(#11146007)
But Twitter has a patent pledge with its engineers [1]:
The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that
keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers.
It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that
patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will
not use the patents from employees’ inventions in
offensive litigation without their permission. What’s
more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold
them to others, they could only use them as the inventor
intended.
[1]: https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-the-innovator-s-pa...
Also, an architecture is not copyrightable. Maybe patentable. Copyrights protect specific expressions, not a general idea, plan, or architecture. At least not yet thankfully I haven't seen anyone try to argue an unrelated software doing same thing is a derivative work.