Comment by chc

Is this the same way Rubinius stole Ruby, Microsoft stole C++ and KDE stole JavaScript? I think the point here is that a language isn't really something you can own. An implementation, sure — but the language itself? Under what law? You can possibly copyright the text of the specification (but certainly not the facts therein), you can copyright the implementation, you can trademark the name and you can patent specific techniques used in the implementation, but what confers ownership of the language itself? I don't believe there is any precedent for a language being wholly "owned" in the sense that nobody else could independently implement the spec.