Sorry for the delay.
Sometimes there's only one way to implement something. If you arrive at
a similar implementation to something that somebody else has done
because that's just the way you'd do it, then you're probably in good
shape. Certainly in the example below, I can easily see many developers
writing exactly the same code.
Don't copy code with an incompatible license. If you do copy code (with
a compatible license), be sure to follow the IP due diligence process,
and give the required attribution.
You cannot copy GPL code and just change the variable names. Just don't
copy it. In this case, just leverage the fantastic code completion
capabilities in the Eclipse IDE and recreate the logic.
HTH,
Wayne
On 15/09/16 10:10 PM, Rezaei, Mohammad A. wrote:
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)) {
} elseif(Character.isValidCodePoint(codePoint)) {
thrownewIllegalArgumentException("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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Wayne Beaton
@waynebeaton
The Eclipse Foundation
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