Bruce Dawson wrote:
One thing that might help would be "clean rooming it"... have *someone
I've done the above in a couple of projects. Mostly by reading the
manpage and the usage report and doing the code based on that, without
looking at the source code of the original program.
Actually, looking at the original source doesn't necessarily taint your
project, either. If it did, no one could look at much of anything other
than their own code. In the case of some low-level stuff, porting from
FreeBSD to Linux and vice versa ends up being a nearly complete rewrite
anyway.
But, IANAL. Your experiences will be different.
Yeah, someone will find a lawyer somewhere who will argue that doing
what either I or Bruce have described creates a derivative work. Doesn't
matter if they are legally correct or not; that's what judges, juries
and courts are for.
To stay spiritually clean, :-) you could look in the BSD source trees
for a module that does the same thing. Then you can do anything you want
with it as long as you keep the notice in the comments.
That's what I would do if I were faced with a large body of code. If it
was a small body of code, I'd just re-write it from scratch.
Another option is to contact who ever claims the copyright on the code,
explain your intent, and ask if you can use it under a different
license. There's nothing in the GPL that says the code can't be
dual-licensed. There are some prominent GPL projects that do this, too.
(MySQL comes to mind and Qt, but Qt is a more complicated story.) To
some extent, that is what OSS is about. Stallman doesn't like it, but
he's not God, merely a saint.... ;)
Cheers,
Jason
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