Question about GPL issue.

[Jason Stephenson]

Bruce Dawson wrote:
> One thing that might help would be "clean rooming it"... have *someone

I've done the above in a couple of projects. Mostly by reading the 
manpage and the usage report and doing the code based on that, without 
looking at the source code of the original program.

Actually, looking at the original source doesn't necessarily taint your 
project, either. If it did, no one could look at much of anything other 
than their own code. In the case of some low-level stuff, porting from 
FreeBSD to Linux and vice versa ends up being a nearly complete rewrite 
anyway.

> 
> But, IANAL. Your experiences will be different.

Yeah, someone will find a lawyer somewhere who will argue that doing 
what either I or Bruce have described creates a derivative work. Doesn't 
matter if they are legally correct or not; that's what judges, juries 
and courts are for.

> 
> 
>>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.

Another option is to contact who ever claims the copyright on the code, 
explain your intent, and ask if you can use it under a different 
license. There's nothing in the GPL that says the code can't be 
dual-licensed. There are some prominent GPL projects that do this, too. 
(MySQL comes to mind and Qt, but Qt is a more complicated story.) To 
some extent, that is what OSS is  about. Stallman doesn't like it, but 
he's not God, merely a saint.... ;)

Cheers,
Jason