On 01/08/2012, at 6:52 AM, Chip Childers <chip.child...@sungard.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know the official ASF stance on what it means to > "re-write" a section of code? There's no general answer to this - each case needs to be considered separately. This was the closest I could find in the archives: http://s.apache.org/rewriting-code > > Specifically, I was looking at the F5 code [1] that was found during > license header changes (and is considered a release blocker bug [2]). > The code is actually quite trivial in nature, and I'm wondering what > it would take to correctly write a replacement class file. My > assumption is that simply re-naming variables wouldn't work (and even > if that was enough, there are only a handful of them in the file). I agree, renaming variables is definitely not right. In this case it is trivial (I googled and found a half-dozen examples doing the same thing), so I'd say remove it and have someone reimplement it. It may be better in these cases if they haven't seen the original code, but not strictly necessary. It is probably a good opportunity to refactor calling code too, if needed. In other cases, an option available is to ask the copyright holder if they'd consider contributing/granting a license to a piece of code to include here. Ultimately, we want to make sure we do the right thing by the authors and that code here is intentionally contributed. HTH, Brett -- Brett Porter br...@apache.org http://brettporter.wordpress.com/ http://au.linkedin.com/in/brettporter http://twitter.com/brettporter
