On 15.02.2010 08:13, Ralph Goers wrote: > I would also suggest that Ceki needs to be careful in not vetoing > things simply because they are already in Logback as there is a > potential conflict of interest here. If Curt's account is indeed true > then I'm not convinced he did anything wrong, although a review of the > code might persuade me. There is nothing necessarily wrong with > looking at some code, learning something from it, and then writing > code independently, but you can't just take the code and modify it a > bit. The difficult part with this is that if the code in question is > small and there are a limited number of ways of doing something then > everything might look like a copyright violation even if it > isn't. Wikipedia, at > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement, provides a good > discussion of the issue.
I agree with your observation about wielding one's veto powers recklessly. Note that even if the person raising intellectual property-related objections regarding some patch had no veto powers, it seems to me that the correct action would be to revert the patch. Concerning the action itself: looking at some code, learning from it and writing code with similar functionality at a later time does not constitute copyright infringement. In this particular case though, the "independent" code was written very shortly after reading the original code as attested by Curt's own admission and the timestamps of commit 909868 and bug report entries in 48704. > Again though, given Apache's rules on vetoing I don't think all this > even matters in this case. Somehow the code needs to be reverted and > then reimplemented. Curt's analysis in the Jira issue, and even > providing more detail about what nio methods to use, would easily be > sufficient to insure that there is no copyright problem. IMO, depending on the level of detail of the transcription, transcribing a piece of java code in a human-language, e.g. English, and then translating it back to java still constitutes copyright infringement, in the same way that rewriting Moby Dick in Spanish and translating it back to English constitutes a violation. It all depends on the level of detail of the transcription. (I am not claiming that my locking code is comparable to Moby Dick, just using it as an example of a well-known creation.) Judging from his recent emails, Curt does not seem to feel any remorse regarding this incident which is particularly unfortunate as as my main concern is avoiding the repetition of future violation. By the way, when copying code from another open source project, the polite thing to do is to ask for permission. Permission is often granted. I still expect Curt to publicly acknowledge his actions as being inappropriate and promise not to repeat them in the future. > I am also concerned by Ceki's observation that there are insufficient > tests in log4j to test the added feature, not from a copyright point > of view but as a general rule. How do you know the code in question > even works? If I was on the PMC I would veto a code commit of a new > feature that had no tests. Yes, a different question. Anyway, I appreciate your participation in this discussion. -- Ceki Gülcü --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
