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| From: | John Croisant |
| Subject: | Re: [Chicken-users] New string manipulation module |
| Date: | Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:52:40 -0500 |
| User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130216 Thunderbird/17.0.3 |
On 2/21/13 9:55 AM, Nicholas Van Horn wrote:
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Dan Leslie <address@hidden
<mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
I'm not certain what you intended by 'official', but if you meant
that you'd like to see it packaged with Chicken then perhaps you
should consider switching the license to Chicken's license. Mind
you, GPL3 eggs are happily accepted, but note that many folks
won't touch them for various reasons. However, if this is a port
of an elisp library then likely re-licensing is not an option.
I would love to package this under the BSD license, but as far as my
limited knowledge is concerned, it seems that I must keep the GPL3
license of the original elisp package. If someone is aware of an
alternative solution, please speak up and I'll change things accordingly.
I am not a lawyer, what follows is not legal advice, etc. ...It's possible to change the license by "clean room" reverse engineering the library, since the new code would (from a legal standpoint) not be a copy or derivative of the original code.
To do that: someone who has not seen any of the "contaminated" source code (i.e. the original library or your port) reimplements the library from scratch based only on a general description of the original library's API and behavior, (e.g. your README file). Then, they can attach any license they wish to the new code.
This approach is typically used to reverse engineer proprietary software, for example to create an open source clone. But there's no reason it couldn't be used to create a clone of another open source library with a different license.
The downside is that it might be considered rude or disrespectful by some people in the open source community, especially if you use the exact same library name and function names as the original.
On the other hand, this library is so simple and obvious that I think it would be very silly for anyone to be offended by it being cloned.
- John
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