#1829: Recent changes impeded building and testing on smaller boxes
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Reporter: jkeenan | Owner:
Type: bug | Status: reopened
Priority: normal | Milestone:
Component: build | Version: 2.8.0
Severity: medium | Resolution:
Keywords: | Lang:
Patch: | Platform:
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Comment(by whiteknight):
In general we cannot use code directly that is under a different open
source license. Think about an essay in a paper in school: You can't just
copy work from somebody else. There is some possibility that we could use
a short snippet of code under a "fair use" provision, but that's shakey in
the world of software and isn't always legal.
Here are the options we have available to us:
- Rewrite the functions ourselves, from scratch, using available
documentation. I don't suspect that the writers of that file will press
charges if our re-write isn't perfectly "clean", but there's no sense
chancing it.
- We can request the author grant a special license to use his code to us
under the artistic license. A friendly, personal email could do the trick
if the author is receptive to that kind of thing. It's my experience that
relatively few people are extremely tied to particular licenses, so this
might be a good option.
- We can include his file in our project, unmodified (including all his
attribution and licensing information). This turns Parrot into what's
called an "aggregate" (in GPL-speak) and puts some additional legal
requirements on our project. For instance, we must include a copy of the
GPL with our distro, declare that Parrot is an aggregate under the
artistic license and the GPL, bar our contributors from making non-GPL
modifications to that file, etc. It's a mess, but should be possible (I
need to re-read the artistic license text for more details on this).
I suggest somebody send Paul Eggert an email, if possible, and see if we
can make this easy on ourselves.
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Ticket URL: <https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1829#comment:7>
Parrot <https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/>
Parrot Development
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