Clone or Just Common Technological Practice

[fern]

Any technical endeavor supposes that previous artifacts has been examined and improved, not rejecting everything that it has been done before. So, the fact that some artifact have some parts that you can recognize as proper of another previous artifacts is not a show of cloning or piracy, but just the way progress occur.
Then, when it happens we have a clone in the sense of an scandalous copy of something?
I would say it is so when two things concur:
a) the number of very similar elements present in the second try is very high
b) the copied elements are identical to and specific and essential in the operations of he copied artifact.
See that "similar and "identical" are very different things even if they produces exactly the same result.

So, in the case of Strelka, we could talk of a clone if the author did copy, say, most of of Rybka code and specially if he used the essential part that makes of Rybka what it is as an original product.
On the contrary, if Strelka uses same tricks that Rybka, but in fact they are tricks that many programs uses because they are now common knowledge, software commodities, we have no cloning.
Strelka probably uses, as Rybka perhaps also does, some tricks coming from Fruit code, but these were freely delivered by his author.
So Strelka, in that case alone, is not cloning Rybka, neither Rybka cloning Fruit, but both making use of common and publically available knowledge.

So far, we could then say Strelka is a clone IF we have the Rybka code before our eyes and IF we can see that Strelka copied the core of that code, the part of it that is sheer wok by Vas and the key of his wonderful program.

Behavior similarity, although suggestive, probably is not enough.

But who Am I to say regards
Fwernando