You're probably right about the copyrightability of trivial patches. If there's really only one obvious way of doing something, that expression typically doesn't enjoy copyright protection.
In any case you should expect people to be conscientious about their licensing choices, particularly people with GPL stripes. But if the ideas are good, you're certainly allowed to reuse them so long as the expression is your own creation. >________________________________ > From: Pedro Giffuni <[email protected]> >To: [email protected]; Joe Schaefer <[email protected]> >Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 8:13 PM >Subject: Re: Question related derivative code based on our Apache licensed code > >--- Lun 16/1/12, Joe Schaefer ha scritto: >... >> Kinda hard to claim you own all the >> rights to >> >> a patch when in 99% of the situations it's merely >> a derivative work of the thing you produced the >> patch from. >> > >FWIW .. I have asked for two set of patches from >LibreOffice authors and my request on both cases >was rejected: > >1. Patches to build with clang. >2. Patches to replace uses of STLport with >boost. > >I personally think neither of those changes are >copyrightable as the changes are pretty easy to >reproduce without looking at them. > >For the rest I don't find the LO changes too >interesting at all. I do see some of our changes >would be interesting to them but I don't think >they have sufficient developers to keep up with >our changes anyways. > >Despite of this, the core of both is still the >SUN/oracle code and the code is not hugely >different yet, perhaps (and it's just my >speculation) 5-6 years of constant development >will still be needed for LO to gain it's own >identity at a source level and even then the >origin will still be traceable. > >Pedro. > > > >
