Re: re-licensing pkt-line.c code

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Sep 25, 2008, 18:01 UTC
Message-ID: <20080925180125.GS3669@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <48DBD114.80805@op5.se>

Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Scott Chacon wrote:
>>
>> There are about 20-25 lines of code from pkt-line.c that I think were
>> originally written back in 2005 that I would like to use [...]
>>
>> I have to relicense this, since I can't legally distribute my source
>> code for the iphone app due to Apples f**king NDA.  I would like to
>> release my ObjectiveGit project under the MIT (or, alternately, LGPL).
>
>>  I could come up with an alternate way to
>> accomplish the same thing, but it seems like a waste of time to do so,
>> and helpful to nobody.
>
> Well, tracking down the original author(s) could turn out to be harder.

Its already cost more time to ask for permission to reuse these 20-25 lines of code than it would take to figure out how to write it yourself, and code it. And Linus still hasn't had a chance to chime in on this thread.

My guess is you aren't going to get approval from him to relicense his code. But he doesn't hold a monopoly on int->hex conversion algorithms so you should be able to implement something that produces the same results, given the same inputs, and not have him sue you in some Utah court.

-- 
Shawn.