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Technology Origins and Legal

Does any of the conversion or runtime technology rely or use Progress Software Corporation technology?

No. There is no Progress Software Corporation (PSC) technology included in this solution.

The first open source release of FWD was created exclusively by Golden Code Development. Both the conversion and runtime technology were created from scratch, with no use of technology from 3rd parties. The compatibility achieved was designed based solely on experiences in writing and running ABL application code. Golden Code Development has neither accessed nor otherwise used PSC intellectual property. This is a clean room implementation of the semantics of the Progress ABL language. It has been thoroughly tested for compatibility based on multiple client-defined certification baseline test sets (each with thousands of tests). PSC has had no participation in this technology in any way.

Doesn't Progress Software Corporation Own the 4GL Language Itself?

No. A language itself cannot be owned or otherwise protected as property.

One can write a book about a language. The book can be copyrighted and would thus be owned by its author. Once that book is published, the knowledge conveyed in that book becomes part of the public domain. The specific words in the book cannot be copied without the permission of its owner. But the ideas and meaning conveyed by the words are free and cannot be owned or protected.

This is the core of the "idea versus expression dichotomy" as documented in the United States Copyright Act of 1976 and in the United States Supreme Court case Baker v Seldon (1879). To quote from the Copyright Act of 1976, Section 102(b):

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

And the legislation's drafters recorded these comments in the House Report No. 94-1476 that makes it even more clear:

Copyright does not preclude others from using the ideas or information revealed by the author’s work. It pertains to the literary, musical, graphic, or artistic form in which the author expressed intellectual concepts.
...
Section 102(b) in no way enlarges or contracts the scope of copyright protection under the present law. Its purpose is to restate, in the context of the new single Federal system of copyright, that the basic dichotomy between expression and idea remains unchanged.

PSC owns (via copyright) one possible implementation of the Progress 4GL language and it owns books it has written about the Progress 4GL language. Those books have been published and have been freely available to the public for decades. Just as writing a book about double-entry accounting does not convey ownership over the practice of double-entry accounting, so too PSC does not own the Progress 4GL language itself.

If this was not the case, then anything written in the Progress 4GL would be owned by PSC. In other words, PSC would own your application and all other applications written in the Progress 4GL language. This
result is not supported by the law. Instead, as the author of the source code for an application that author owns all rights (including copyrights) in that work.

At its most basic level, a language is a set of words and the syntax/grammar with which those words can be combined to express some meaning. By itself, a language does not express anything. Rather, languages are just a set of conventions or rules that when shared can allow meaning to be expressed between two or more entities. When someone does express something in that language, the expression is owned by the author, not the entity that originally defined the language.

Knowledge about the language will certainly include ideas that were originally created by PSC, but these ideas are not owned by anyone and in fact, that knowledge is now collectively in the public domain.

Who created the conversion technology?

Golden Code Development Corporation is the sole creator and owner of the first open source release of the conversion technology. At the core is the TRee Processing Language (TRPL), which enables highly complex analysis and transformation of source code. TRPL in turn was based on expression and pattern processing technology which Golden Code Development started in 1998.

All of the Progress 4GL-specific technology (preprocessor, lexer, parser, conversion rules and supporting libraries) has been created from scratch by Golden Code Development engineers based solely on their experiences in writing and running 4GL application code. Golden Code Development has neither accessed nor otherwise used Progress Software Corporation intellectual property. This is a completely clean room implementation.

All subsequent contributions to the FWD project have been done in accordance with the project's Contributor Agreement.

Who created the runtime technology?

Golden Code Development Corporation is the sole creator and owner first open source release of the runtime technology. Many runtime components are generic technologies created to support distributed Java applications. For example, the directory service, security manager and distributed application protocol are all technologies completely unrelated to the Progress ABL. Some of these technologies are based on prior work dating back to the late 1990's but in all cases, the work has been completely created and is completely owned by Golden Code Development Corporation.

All of the Progress ABL-specific runtime technology has been created from scratch by Golden Code Development engineers based solely on their experiences in writing and running ABL application code. Golden Code Development has neither accessed nor otherwise used Progress Software Corporation intellectual property. This is a completely clean room implementation of the semantics of the Progress ABL language. It has been thoroughly tested for compatibility based on multiple client-defined certification baseline test sets (each with thousands of tests). PSC has had no participation in this technology in any way.

All subsequent contributions to the FWD project have been done in accordance with the project's Contributor Agreement.

What legal rights must an organization have to legally convert an ABL application?

The conversion results in a derivative work of the original application. If the application in question is owned by a 3rd party, the client must have a source license which provides unrestricted rights to create derivative works. If the client was the originator of the source or otherwise owns the source of the application, then no further rights are required.

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