IANAL, so I imagine since you’re concerned you should really talk to one.
Having said that, I don’t see an issue with this code. The original JDK code
has a different method signature (arrays vs StringBuilder), which makes the
code literally quite different. The only literal copies are these 3 lines:
if (Character.isBmpCodePoint(codePoint)) {
} else if (Character.isValidCodePoint(codePoint)) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid codepoint " + codePoint);
Taking each line in isolation, it’s inconceivable that they would cause an
issue, because there is no other way to invoke those methods on Character. If
Oracle objects to someone putting Character.isXXXCodePoint() in an
if-statement, I’d be curious to understand why they’d provide the method in the
first place. And the exception is common place.
So that only leaves the overall structure (the if-else-elseThrow construct).
The structure would be considered ordinary to anyone familiar with code points.
Again, just my take on this (and I don’t speak for anyone but myself). I’d be
curious to hear from the Eclipse IP team (de minimis and all that).
Thanks
Moh
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Jeen Broekstra
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2016 6:07 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [incubation] reusing (modified) GPL code: at which length does this
become a problem?
I have a contributor on our project (RDF4J) who has submitted a patch which
includes a modified copy of a method taken from the OpenJDK source code. It
mentions this fact in the code comments.
The method in question is quite basic (it's a conversion from codepoint
integers to chars, all in all about 15 lines of code). The modification of the
original is an optimization for our specific purposes (avoiding creation of a
lot of internal string arrays).
The OpenJDK source code is licensed under GPL, and as I understand its terms,
inclusion of a (modified) copy of GPL code would require us to distribute the
entire project under GPL (which is clearly not what we want).
So the question is: at which point does such a "modified copy" of GPL code
become significant enough that it no longer counts as simple 'citation'? Are
there allowances in the number of lines and/or the fundamental simplicity of
the algorithm that would enable us to accept this patch?
The contribution in question (including discussion) can be seen here:
https://github.com/eclipse/rdf4j/pull/571<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_eclipse_rdf4j_pull_571&d=DQMFaQ&c=7563p3e2zaQw0AB1wrFVgyagb2IE5rTZOYPxLxfZlX4&r=WO9SQd1Mj_MLmgtN0ygndwVT53kakt6AadiaNwh95V0&m=XMVDo2KhZwXd1jCA5o623RZSJC3b_nE_CJrmHQyhtTo&s=GO5LVPabh6aLrsGAtn5bogpWeQJIlmMAXzCc-PtxoJw&e=>
Regards,
Jeen
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