[Daniel Shahaf]
> I believe some third-party implementations are GPL'd --- meaning that we
> can't borrow code from them --- so one should be careful in what parts
> of what implementations one chooses to read.
Indeed, my script is GPL, mostly because although I rewrote almost the
entire thing, it _is_ based on Robert Millan's work, which is GPL.
But anyway, as Hyrum says, borrowing ideas and algorithms is not
copyright infringement. The reason to avoid reading another
implementation is to avoid the accusation of copying and pasting, if
you should happen to end up with similar code somewhere. But it would
be hard to imagine any of the literal text of a shell script winding up
verbatim in a C library implementation.
As for the documentation, if there were any point in borrowing anything
from my svn-bisect.1, I note it was 100% written by me, is _not_ GPL:
.\" svn-bisect.1
.\" Copyright 2009 by Peter Samuelson
.\" Permission is granted to everyone to use and distribute this work,
.\" without limitation, modified or unmodified, in any way, for any purpose.
Hmmm ... actually I should take a closer look at my rewrite and figure
out whether any of it still resembles Robert's work enough for him to
retain copyright interest. According to diff --minimal -w, there's
only 18 lines untouched, not counting blank lines or GPL boilerplate.
And some of those 18 lines are in the usage() function.
--
Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/
Received on 2011-06-28 18:01:22 CEST