Question about GPL issue.

[Bruce Dawson]

Jeff Kinz wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 01:44:43PM -0400, Steven W. Orr wrote:
>>I do pretty well here, so I thought I'd go to the well one more time.
>>
>>I am sure that I read something somewhere (though I could be wrong) where 
>>RMS said that he happily took other people's code and essentially changed 
>>the names of the variables and slapped a GPL at the beginning of the file.
>>
>>I would like to do the opposite. (I can't go into details, but please 
>>trust me when I say that there is no evil involved in this exercise.) I 
>>want to take a small module (yes I know that size doesn't *really* count) 
>>and swing it out of GPL using the same technique. Can anyone point me to 
>>where RMS said this? I do remember that it was a long time ago, maybe 10 
>>years or so.

Keep in mind that the GPL was written before the DMCA.

> Doing that is certainly a violation of copyright even though you
> probably would never get caught.  

10% difference *used to be* the rule of thumb, but the interpretation
changed a lot with DMCA. Also, intent enters into the fray, and I
believe just changing variable names would be considered mal-intent. But
 I believe there are lots of exceptions exhibited in case law. IANAL.

Also, I've seen code that RMS has "rewritten", and he tends to change a
lot more than just variable names... he tends towards switching looping
constructs, using increments, ... I believe his phrase of "just change a
few variables" is more euphemism than actual fact. It appears to be
really hard for him not to make code more efficient (and given his
experience with the C compiler, he is *very* good at writing efficient
code).

One thing that might help would be "clean rooming it"... have *someone
else* (and that is *very* important) write a clear and concise
description (preferably in English, not a machine language) of what the
code does, and then have yet another person write code from that
description. It would help if you could *prove* that person #2 never saw
the original code, but this is hard with FOSS being so widely used in
schools. If memory serves me correctly, this is how HDB UUCP was
created; Dan Honeyman used a description of the protocol written by
Chuck Wegrzyn.

But, IANAL. Your experiences will be different.

> To stay spiritually clean, :-) you could look in the BSD source trees
> for a module that does the same thing.  Then you can do anything you want
> with it as long as you keep the notice in the comments.

That's what I would do if I were faced with a large body of code. If it
was a small body of code, I'd just re-write it from scratch.

--Bruce