It's good advice. I would never find my self doing copy-and-paste from other code in general, and absolutely never code that wasn't licensed compatibly. That's not what happened anyhow -- funnily enough Harmony does exactly the faster variant I had in mind, looping backwards over the characters. So just kinda validated what I was doing anyway.
On a tangent, and don't intend to disagree with what you've said but express another sentiment -- I find myself concerned if developers feel like copyright and patent law has such vague boundaries and implications, that the conventional wisdom is that we can't understand it, predict its meaning, and must simply steer clear of anything that smells like a copyright or patent issue. That would be to give IP holders more rights than the law grants them. It is possible to take this too far by suggesting 'never ever' look at, say, GPLed source code if one is touching an Apache proejct. This is not positive nor what the IP regime intended to prohibit. In the interest of containing the implications of my opinions to myself rather than Apache, I intend to exercise a higher level caution here even if at times I would find it unfortunate and excessive. Apologies for the tangent but on another project I feel I've been both the recipient of patent bullying, and had to silently tolerate some actions from companies that is unethical -- but within the bounds of the license. On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Grant Ingersoll<[email protected]> wrote: > +1. > > It's wise practice to never ever: > 1. look at source for code that isn't ASL compatible > 2. read patents and try to pretend like it is possible to understand what > some lawyer means or how some judge/jury might interpret it. > > -Grant > >
