On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 11:31 PM, Dirk-Willem van Gulik < [email protected]> wrote:
> Sorry - that is the algorithm - not the *implementation*. > > If you wrote it from scratch - just using documents like above - then you > are good (and all that is needed is a software grant from you - or a > contribution under a CLA - and point to the document as the source.). > > HOWEVER if you took some random piece of existing code and 'erlangfied' it; > or cut-and-pasted, say, C, Perl, Java or other third party existing code > into it - and then massaged that to work *then* you have to be significantly > more careful. There are then 4 cases: > > - You only took one or two lines from someone else their code 'in > total' as a starting point. > > - You took some lines from code under a BSD, ASL or similar 'open' > license (e.g. say from APR or from OpenSSL itself). > > - You took code from a GPL, LGPL or similar family of code. > > - You took code which someone (you perhaps) once wrote for a company. > > In the first two cases; no problem - just document where you took it and > point to the license as needed. In the third case - big no-no; in the final > case - better get permission from the person who paid you. > > As to 'recognizing' this - you'd be surprized how unique certain > spaces/variable name and orderings are - and how many permutations are > possible - or in other words - how long the 'fingerprint' of a given > original last through cut and paste. > Excellent, thanks very much for the clarification - I'm thoroughly inexperienced when it comes to licensing. My code was based off of pseudocode listed on Wikipedia and so (I believe) would fall under the CC-BY-SA license - I've updated the Jira issue as appropriate. Thank you for catching this early. Jonathan Thanks, > > Dw. >
