[HN Gopher] Do open source licences cover the Ship of Theseus?
___________________________________________________________________
Do open source licences cover the Ship of Theseus?
Author : edent
Score : 111 points
Date : 2023-06-09 11:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi)
(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I did something similar to this years ago. I forked a GPL'd
| project that had been BSD prior to that and wanted to flip it
| back to BSD. I contacted the people who had contributed since the
| license change and got most of them to agree to a relicense but
| was left with ~900 lines of code that wasn't going to change. I
| worked with an IP attorney and came up with a strategy that
| worked in my case (but don't blindly apply it to yours):
|
| - I wrote unit tests for every single one of those functions to
| confirm/validate the behavior.
|
| - Then I deleted all 900 lines of code and committed it.
|
| - Then I wrote code to make the unit tests pass again.
|
| It was painful but that kept it tightly scoped and I could
| "prove" the behavior hadn't changed AND that I didn't use the
| original code.
|
| There's an argument that the unit tests could be a "derivative
| work" but they were not part of the original system, did not
| change or add functionality to the system, and did not impact its
| performance so we discounted that concern.
|
| The more pressing was that - as an open source project - and the
| guy doing the audit, I had reviewed the GPL implementation and
| had access to it at any time. What helped me there is that I made
| a point of using more modern language constructs and patterns
| which improved the performance of those functions by 30-90% and I
| resolved a number of buggy edge cases and other problems so it
| was clearly "substantially different" in implementation.
|
| This was never tested in a lawsuit and do NOT take the above as a
| definitive solution.
| maxloh wrote:
| What is the project you worked on?
| plonk wrote:
| Could you maybe have deleted the unit tests and written new
| ones based on the new code to be safe? After all you know that
| the new behavior is good.
| goodpoint wrote:
| You are not breaching the GPL in the letter but you surely
| broke it in the spirit.
| dtech wrote:
| Interesting, this does sound a bit like clean-room reverse
| engineering which is a tried-and-true method for reproduction
| without breaking copyright, but you having access to and having
| reviewed the GPL implementation would break that mold.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Interesting, this does sound a bit like clean-room reverse
| engineering which is a tried-and-true method for reproduction
| without breaking copyright
|
| To me, it seems obvious that if the developer read the code
| that's getting replaced and reproduced its behavior to the T,
| by reading it and running it many times... that's the
| opposite of a clean room implementation. What do you think a
| dirty room implementation is then?
|
| I'm not saying you are right or wrong, I'm not an IP attorney
| and I think IP is really boring. I can see how if a developer
| at a giant company rewrites open source X in Swift, C# or
| Golang in order to exploit it commercially, there could be a
| cathedral of opinions that would support, "Okay, this is what
| is meant by clean room." In the same way that BigCo
| developers work with their attorneys to file patents for
| ideas they saw elsewhere and didn't invent all the time. It's
| one of many possible beliefs about IP, and it can even thrive
| in reality, but it doesn't mean it is a correct one.
| klyrs wrote:
| From the wikipedia clean room page:
|
| > Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone
| examine the system to be reimplemented and having this person
| write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by
| a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included.
| The specification is then implemented by a team with no
| connection to the original examiners.
|
| Without the disconnection between examiners and implementers,
| it's only slightly similar to a clean room. And we have new
| case law to consider: an API may be subject to copyright, and
| those unit tests are _highly_ suspect under that lens.
| maxloh wrote:
| It is very similar to what Google did for Java SE libraries
| too.
| dspillett wrote:
| It is very similar in spirit to how mp3 patents were worked
| around back on the late 90s / early 00s.
|
| Of course copyright and patents are different beasts, so this
| similarity is probably legally insignificant.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah, adding another engineer to the process would probably
| make it "cleaner" if you thought the other party was
| motivated to want to sue you.
| earhart wrote:
| Just curious - what was your motivation?
| Y_Y wrote:
| That sounds like something I could get an LLM to do. And then
| of course I can do it iteratively until all the code has been
| laundered. Maybe that's how Microsoft can justify training on
| all the GitHub data.
| jcranmer wrote:
| IANAL, but my understanding of copyright law jurisprudence is
| that using an LLM to automate the process is going to
| _substantially_ increase the likelihood that you will be
| found to be infringing.
| foota wrote:
| I think, but I'm not sure, that they mean to write the
| tests, and then they'd be able to fix the implementation
| blindly?
| trhr wrote:
| I once got fired over a single line of PHP that they "traced back
| to" whatever came before stackexchange. This was in the before-
| times when people didn't rip things off the internet all day
| long. Companies were really worried about intellectual property
| when they needed to reduce headcount.
|
| I don't even remember what the line of code did. I remember it
| was something absolutely trivial and common though, like trimming
| the first and last character off a string, then splitting it on a
| delimiter. They called it "specialized functionality" that
| "matched character for character with copyrighted code." I called
| it "overreacting to two good developers both typing the same
| exact 30 characters in a row."
| parpfish wrote:
| That's nuts.
|
| Sometimes if I find a weird hack solution on S/O, I'll add a
| comment that permalinks to the thread that fixed it in order to
| prevent a Chestertons fence problem. Maybe I should stop doing
| that?
| lionkor wrote:
| SO content is public domain, so not usually a problem
|
| Edit: I stand corrected, its not public domain.
| shagie wrote:
| SO content is _NOT_ public domain. It is CC BY-SA (some
| version).
|
| This requires attribution.
|
| > Attribution -- You must give appropriate credit, provide
| a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
| You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way
| that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
|
| Additionally, the province of code on Stack Overflow is not
| always clean. It is quite possible to find code on SO that
| was originally under a GPL license without the necessary
| "this is GPL code" (and really shouldn't be on SO because
| of license laundering in the first place).
| parpfish wrote:
| what if it's not code per se but more like "if you see
| this error, make sure to use this flag/change the value
| of this parameter"?
| shagie wrote:
| If you copy those exact words, that's copyrighted and
| under a CC license.
|
| If you follow the instructions, you're completely fine
| since how _you_ do that is up to you.
|
| This is covered under the idea-expression dichotomy (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea-expression_distinction
| ).
|
| It is the _expression_ of an idea - not the idea itself -
| that is copyrightable.
|
| I can paint a picture of a red house on a wooded hillside
| with a snow capped mountain in the background. My
| painting is copyrighted. You can paint the same thing
| based on the the same description. I can't copyright the
| _idea_ of the red house on a wooded hillside with a snow
| capped mountain in the background (I can copyright the
| text, but that text likely lacks sufficient originality).
|
| Likewise, I can't copyright the idea of how to fix a
| problem. I can copyright some particular code that fixes
| that problem. I can copyright the text that describes how
| to fix the problem - but I can't copyright the _idea_.
| Creative Commons, GPL, and the rest of the FOSS licenses
| all deal with copyrights - not ideas.
|
| If you _do_ want to protect an idea, that is in the
| domain of a patent. "This particular arrangement of
| latches and levers solves the problem of how to open the
| back of a truck with minimal force" - that idea of the
| arrangement of latches and levers is patentable.
| lionkor wrote:
| Oh, okay, sorry - my mistake. I have yet to use SO code
| anywhere, only been doing this for a few years, so I
| havent looked into it more.
| klyrs wrote:
| This is why I always put my name and my employer's name in
| every function/variable name.
|
| (heavy sarcasm)
| latexr wrote:
| > Is anyone _seriously_ going to argue that I stole half a dozen
| bytes?
|
| The license itself might provide a clue. For example, the MIT
| license1 says (emphasis mine):
|
| > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
| included in all copies or _substantial portions_ of the Software.
|
| Half a dozen bytes are unlikely to constitute a "substantial
| portion" of the software.
|
| 1 https://opensource.org/license/mit/
| edent wrote:
| How many bytes is substantial?
|
| Or is it percentage based?
| Tomte wrote:
| The LGPL has this provision:
|
| "You may convey such object code under terms of your choice,
| provided that, if the incorporated material is not limited to
| numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, or
| small macros, inline functions and templates (ten or fewer
| lines in length), [...]"
| Asooka wrote:
| Hm. Newlines are not required in many programming languages.
| I could see someone trying to skirt this by first converting
| the code to a single line, publishing that under LGPL, then
| taking that single line and modifying it however they like in
| their proprietary licensed software.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The cleanroom idea is a very good starting point.
|
| The famous example is the IBM bios the company reverse
| engineered. One of the execs had read the IBM spec, so they
| "sealed off" a couple of other engineers who were not allowed to
| talk to (anyone? the guy who read the spec?)
|
| And then this people used reverse engineering techniques to build
| a bios that did the same as the working one they had, but all
| they could see was electrical currents coming out of the pins
| etc.
|
| So I think copyright law would allow you to look at a web page
| and, _without viewing the source_ rebuild the page from scratch
| (ie box is red and 12 pixels wide)
|
| The more interesting part is what happens if one person writes a
| 1,000 lines of open source licensed code, then another comes
| along and writes a different 800 lines replacing each of the
| original lines but with the same output.
|
| That's much more a ship of theseus - but really it's a moot point
| - the second person would (have to?) release each new "plank"
| under an open source license.
|
| So depending on the license I guess you can chnage the license by
| replacing all the original code with new code under a new
| license.
|
| Hmm - I see ...
|
| I think there is some implication here - that you could not (as
| easily?) build the new lines of code if you did not have the
| "scaffolding" of the original there - and I suspect that might be
| the way to argue the ship is still originally theseus ?
| jefftk wrote:
| More on Compaq's reverse engineering:
| https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
| moffkalast wrote:
| > And then this people used reverse engineering techniques to
| build a bios that did the same as the working one they had, but
| all they could see was electrical currents coming out of the
| pins etc.
|
| > So I think copyright law would allow you to look at a web
| page and, without viewing the source rebuild the page from
| scratch (ie box is red and 12 pixels wide)
|
| What I don't exactly see is, how the hell do you prove you
| didn't just rip off the original and pretended you never saw
| it? In fact if you knew what the original was it would be
| easier to use different methods that would otherwise likely be
| duplicated because people go for the obvious solution first.
| jahewson wrote:
| The best answer is "it depends". Almost any trick a layman can
| think of to work around a license is probably wrong.
|
| A mindless transliteration of those 800 lines is likely a
| derivative work, whereas a thoughtful re-creation likely isn't.
| Copying an API for compatibility is regarded as a derived work
| but permitted as fair use (Oracle vs Google). There's also the
| notion of _de minimis_ copying were a very (very!) small
| portion of a work is regarded as insubstantial - maybe a line
| or two, again see Oracle vs Google.
| [deleted]
| 23B1 wrote:
| Historically, the "reasonable person" standard has been
| sufficient for a handful of things like obscenity, IP, and other
| nuanced things.
|
| I wonder how much that will change in the age of AI!
| pessimizer wrote:
| "Reasonable person" is not a good standard for anything
| nuanced. Sometimes you need a "moron in a hurry" to eliminate
| all nuance.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Yes, this is why there are so many lawyers in the world.
| Ain't it grand?! /s
| bitwize wrote:
| Always speak on the internet as if the least reasonable
| person in the world gave your words the least charitable
| interpretation possible.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Open source licenses are quite clear. We needn't appeal to
| overused-by-nerds buzzwordy Greek paradoxes, just read the
| license and carry on.
| praptak wrote:
| Two exact same strings of bits may have different statuses
| because of how they were produced:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506986
|
| Once you take that into account the copyrighted Ship of Theseus
| becomes less of a paradox.
| einpoklum wrote:
| It's quite possible that this will be answered by people's
| behavior in practice rather than by philosophizing about it.
|
| If FOSS projects develop which include tiny bits from copyrighted
| pieces of software, and they are not challenged for long enough,
| and see wide use - then the answer will be effectively "yes". If
| people steer clear of doing this and ask permission for every
| little bit used - then that will be the custom, and those who
| don't might end up in court.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| IANAL, but common open source licenses is a Yes. Non-licensed
| works are legally murkier.
|
| You have a _derivative work_ based on the original. The author
| retains the copyright, but has granted some permissions within
| the license document. What you can and can 't do will be spelled
| out there. For example, the MIT license expressly permits
| modification _and_ sublicensing [0]. The GNU GPL3 is even more
| explicit, giving definitions to modify, distribute, their
| permissions, and the requirements for both [1]. Double-check what
| the terms of the license give you explicitly.
|
| What if their is no license? I think that gets closer to the
| heart of the article. Imagine you come across a website design
| you like. What are the permissions for their HTML or CSS? By
| definition the distributor controls all aspects under copyright.
| But if you only use a small part, you can defend yourself under
| _Fair Use_. But this is murky legal territory, as Entertainment
| companies and individuals have sued each other over Music Samples
| and their relevant copyright and licensing.
|
| [0]: https://mit-license.org/
|
| [1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Legally in the US it's a question of whether copyright was
| violated or not when you copy a tiny bit.
|
| I'm not a lawyer but I feel confident in saying that you can copy
| a background color without a license, because a background color
| alone is definitely not copyrightable.
|
| But in the grey area... it's a grey area. There is lots of case
| law we could look at, but ultimately it depends on what a judge
| or jury would think if anyone took you to court. And sometimes
| they do surprising things.
|
| Which is why for well-resourced commercial operations (that have
| more to lose and more to gain), they don't take the risk. In this
| case... is anyone going to even notice or get mad if they notice
| you took 40% of a free HTML template for some random not-million-
| dollar website? Probabably not? If they do, then saying sorry and
| adding the attribution will probably suffice?
|
| That's the legal situation. I think it is reasonable to ask an
| ethical question separated from legality, which is a different
| question. Sometimes I ask the authors of open-source-licensed
| things what they would think about my use.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Part of this is the "Look and Feel" Supreme Court decision from
| Apple v Microsoft (IIRC). Apple sued MS for copying the way
| their OS looked, and the Supreme Court said the entire thing
| wasn't able to be protected. But that only settled the "whole
| thing", not parts of pieces. Where that line is is the Grey
| area.
| brookst wrote:
| Colors are not copyrightable, but they can be protected by
| trademarks: https://www.businessinsider.com/colors-that-are-
| trademarked-...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| True. As the article you linked to explains, a trademark on a
| color would prevent you from using the color(s) in ways that
| compete or confuse with the original company/product, but not
| any use of a color at all. It almost definitely isn't going
| to apply to the bg color an open sourced HTML template chose.
| ghaff wrote:
| Though, to be more precise, it's protecting colors as part of
| the trade dress of a brand. In general, some especially
| vigilant trademark enforcement aside, you can use the color
| so long as it's not being used in a way that could plausibly
| cause confusion with the trademark holder.
| layer8 wrote:
| As a sibling comment notes, one important aspect is whether the
| copied portion is something copyrightable in the first place. In
| particular, whether it exceeds the threshold of originality [0],
| which at least in the US requires "some minimal degree of
| creativity". It's rather unlikely for "half a dozen bytes" to
| meet that criterion.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
| jahewson wrote:
| That's not the right way to approach this. There's no way to
| subdivide a copyrightable work into portions that become
| uncopyrightable. Otherwise one could simply split up the work,
| free themselves of copyright, and reassemble the pieces. A work
| is by definition an assembly of pieces; it is not meaningful to
| talk about copyright at the piece level.
|
| The way it actually works is that very small portions of a work
| are still under copyright but their copying is regarded as _de
| minimis_ , so small as to be permitted. For example, sampling a
| single snare dum hit from a song.
|
| Copying a color is even less than that, it's like copying a
| single word from a book, it's a piece from which the work is
| made up but it's not a work, it's not even a portion of a work.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Aristotle would probably say yeah it's the sand code
| tiberious726 wrote:
| This is not the ship of Theseus, the a correct application of
| that concept would be rewriting the gdb module by module, testing
| each step of the way, and then falsely pretending that the gpl
| wouldn't apply even after 100% of the original code is replaced
| ineedasername wrote:
| Considering my ability to turn a block of beautiful code into
| spaghetti, the answer is yes-- I always leave in the original
| attribution /s
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| I think the whole idea of "clean-room reverse engineering" is
| essentially predicated on the idea that copyright would indeed
| apply to a scenario where you take a copyrighted work and
| incrementally replace all the individual pieces
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| Back in the IBM BIOS days, they were writing machine code.
| Basically a series of operation codes (ie, numbers).
|
| Two people trying to implement the same complex system were
| almost guaranteed to produce the same code for several
| components. A clean-room procedure offers a verifiable defense
| that the duplication was not a result of copying.
|
| Today we use much higher level languages so it's trivial to
| write the same code a hundred different ways. I'm not sure a
| clean room is worth the effort other than to force the engineer
| to not be lazy and copy.
|
| All that said, there's also copyright rules covering derivative
| works. I'm sure there's plenty of precedent in literature to
| cover "copying without actually copying" but I wouldn't know
| how that works.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| That's funny - I think the opposite! Clean-room reverse
| engineering would give you the same indivisible line of code
| (background-color: #xyz;) so it _can 't_ be required... or can
| it?
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| I'm thinking of stuff like the re-implementation of the IBM
| bios where the re-implementation had to effectively match a
| certain undocumented specification but not necessarily follow
| the actual implementation from the original bios
|
| but in some sense clean-room reverse engineering does
| necessarily entail that certain things will be identical, and
| I guess the scenario in the article could be describing a
| situation where none of the final product matches the
| original template at all, so maybe it is slightly different,
| and in that case I guess there wouldn't be a copyright issue
| at all?
|
| It would be more like how when movies are made they tend to
| use existing music as a placeholder until the final music is
| made, and it doesn't seem like anyone considers the final
| movie to require a license from the creator of the
| placeholder song even though the direction of the final work
| is often strongly influenced by its pacing
| 13of40 wrote:
| I've actually wondered why projects like WINE and ReactOS
| didn't just start with Windows and replace one DLL at a time
| until there was no Windows code left. Then again, it seems
| weird that we hyper focus on the value of the source code and
| not all the engineering effort that went into the architecture.
| As in I can make a command-for-command knockoff of Unix and
| that's fair game, but if I reuse "a = b + c" that's a
| violation.
| tunesmith wrote:
| This distantly reminds me of the Jonathan Coulson / Glee
| situation that happened a few years back.
|
| Basically, a recording of his came out that had the lyrics to
| "Baby Got Back", but against music that was entirely fresh and
| original. And then later, Glee had a scene with a (really weird)
| a cappella group that did a cover of Coulton's recording - his
| music, but with the Baby Got Back lyrics.
|
| The show gave Coulson zero credit, didn't ask his permission,
| didn't give him any compensation, and I believe didn't give him
| any notice ahead of time. (I'm typing this all from memory, so
| I'm sure I might have some details wrong, but that's the thrust.)
|
| So the question is, should they have? It turns out it depends
| entirely on how the creation process was described.
|
| There's an old songwriting exercise where you take a song, and
| then write entirely different music for the lyrics, and then
| write new lyrics for the song. Presto, it's a whole new song, and
| there's nothing wrong with that songwriting process. You can do
| the reverse where you write new lyrics for the old music, and
| then new music for the new lyrics, too.
|
| Coulson could have easily written that new music for "Baby Got
| Back", and then written new lyrics for it, and copyrighted the
| song. And then, I'm not sure, but he possibly could have then
| released the version with the "Baby Got Back" lyrics as a
| joke/parody of his song, and it still would have been his song.
| But since he released his version as a cover of "Baby Got Back",
| all Fox had to do was "steal" his version, pay the royalties to
| Sir Mix-A-Lot, and cut out Coulton entirely.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| (tiny correction: It's Jonathan Coul _t_ on. Coul _s_ on is the
| Marvel SHIELD agent)
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > Coulson could have easily written that new music for "Baby
| Got Back", and then written new lyrics for it, and copyrighted
| the song.
|
| Why wouldn't Coulton have the copyright on his version of the
| song? If I create a derivative work, I would own the copyright
| on the modifications, so I would have thought that Coulton
| would similarly own the copyright on his music.
|
| For example, if I take Apache-licensed source code, add my own
| modifications, and release my work under the GPL v3 (as is
| permitted by both licences), someone else cannot reuse my work
| under the terms of the Apache licence, just because it is a
| derivative work of something licensed under the Apache licence.
| They would have to follow the GPL if they wanted to use my
| version. So how is that different to Fox reusing Coulton's work
| without his permission?
| manicennui wrote:
| "Is anyone seriously going to argue that I stole half a dozen
| bytes?"
|
| There are many companies that would love to be able to sue and
| get settlements for such nonsense.
| saghm wrote:
| Slightly more than "half a dozen bytes", and copyright rather
| than license but see the "rangeCheck" allegation from Oracle
| back in their trial against Google:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...
|
| > The copyright phase started on April 16, 2012, and consisted
| of several distinct claims of infringement: a nine-line
| rangeCheck function, several test files, the structure,
| sequence and organization (SSO) of the Java (API), and the API
| documentation > ... > Alsup did agree with the jury that the
| rangeCheck function and eight security files were a copyright
| infringement, but the only relief available was statutory
| damages up to a maximum of US$150,000
|
| The damages were small (and included some other files beyond
| just the 9-line function), but from my(obligatorily disclaimed
| as non-lawyer) understanding, there is legal precedent that
| copying a nine-line function.
|
| (I had a little trouble digging up the exact line lines of code
| since I don't know offhand where to find the Java standard
| library sources, but if anyone is curious, I did find them in
| this blogpost:
| https://majadhondt.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/googles-9-lines/)
| kuratkull wrote:
| 50/50 imho. You still change what was there to begin with,and it
| made you structure your new additions into the one created by the
| author. Basically if you look at your code evolve in eg. Git
| commits, you see how it evolves out of the licensed code, thus
| carrying the license with each commit. Not sure how I feel about
| that though in extreme cases like yours. Someone can create a
| "hello world" file and add a license to it, how should we handle
| that?
| brudgers wrote:
| If it matters ethically, then asking the question already
| provides the answer because foregoing actions which might be
| gotten away with is what it means to act ethically.
|
| If it matters legally pay your attorney for legal advice, because
| there is no government agency that enforces licenses, the degree
| to which a license matters is the degree to which someone is
| willing to lawyer up.
|
| If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > If it matters ethically
|
| When you use the word 'it', are you referring to "giving
| credit", or the question "Do I need to give credit"?
|
| The former would mean "If giving credit matters ethically, then
| asking the question provides the answer [which is yes.]". But
| that's just asking the same question as OP. _Does_ giving
| credit matter?
|
| The latter would mean "If you felt like you might need to give
| credit, that the answer to that question matters ethically,
| then that provides the answer [which is yes, you need to give
| credit]". But that sounds wrong to me. That kind of logic would
| turn every positive impulse into an instant obligation.
| brudgers wrote:
| Every 'it' is the same.
|
| Ethical behavior is erring on the side of caution in the face
| of uncertainty, ambiguity, or doubt.
|
| That's what makes it ethical behavior.
|
| Giving unnecessary credit is not unethical.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Donating to and volunteering for every good cause you see,
| every time you see it, will bankrupt you and deprive you of
| sleep pretty fast.
|
| You can't err on the side of nicety in every single
| situation.
|
| If an argument depends on there being no cost, then you're
| not actually making an ethical determination, you're just
| saying "better safe than sorry".
|
| Caution and ethics are not the same thing.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| You're just punting on the question. To rephrase, does it
| matter ethically, legally, or at all?
|
| (Yes, I understand that if you're basing a business off it then
| it matters legally differently than if you're just hacking away
| on a hobby project, but the law covers all things and ethics is
| not confined to hobbies.)
| brudgers wrote:
| None of it matters to me enough to pay a lawyer.
|
| Because I am not in the circumstances described in the
| question.
|
| Or your comment.
|
| All three cases, yours, the article, and mine depend on the
| specific facts.
| [deleted]
| grayhatter wrote:
| The only responsability is for attribution? Then I think you have
| an ethical and contractual obligation to include it. Ship of
| Theseus or not, the ship you're currently riding on only exists
| because of their work. Even if you believe like me, that the
| current author is entitled to both primary authorship and
| ownership. Had you never started from their work, no ship, or an
| entirely different ship would exist instead. Even if there's so
| little left of the original that it's meaningless, you should
| still credit them if for historical context alone.
|
| Credit isn't a zero sum game. You don't lose value by including
| others contributions. You should be proud to accept credit for
| your work! You should be willing to share that credit as widely
| as you're able. And no one should ever feel guilty for standing
| on the shoulders of giants.
| ghaff wrote:
| I wouldn't bother for a background color. For something more
| substantial but still minimal, I'd probably figure no skin off
| my nose to give credit. There is a bit of a rub if the original
| is under a copyleft license and you want to release under a
| permissive license. Giving attribution could be a bit of a red
| flag--and maybe it should be unless the code that made it into
| the final product really is minimal.
| gumby wrote:
| The post isn't really about the ship of theseus case. Most
| comments are about the cases discussed in the post, but the SoT
| case is worth mention as that case seems pretty clear:*
|
| 1. If the code started with was *GPL'ed, each edit resulted in a
| GPL'ed piece of code, thus the final edit was a change to a GPL'd
| piece of code and the result is GPLed.
|
| This is basically no different from doing the same with a
| proprietary library you'd licensed from a vendor.
|
| Because you looked at the code to begin with you couldn't make
| the "clean room implementation" argument even if every line were
| different.
|
| 2. MIT or related licenses: just depends on whether what remains
| is "substantial".
|
| * modulo the effect of interested lawyers, of course.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > If the code started with was *GPL'ed, each edit resulted in a
| GPL'ed piece of code, thus the final edit was a change to a
| GPL'd piece of code and the result is GPLed.
|
| The second clause is not correct. Each edit does not result in
| GPL'd code. GPL only applies to the code you start with. If you
| want to redistribute the code with the modifications, then the
| GPL requires that you make your changes available under the
| GPL. If you cannot license the work in this way, then you may
| not redistribute it; the licensing under the GPL is not
| automatic, and it may not even be possible (e.g., if the
| modifications are copied from code with an incompatible
| licence). But this does not apply if none of the code you want
| to distribute is covered under the GPL. So if you remove all of
| the original code, and your final work is independent of the
| original, then the GPL would not apply.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Is 1) actually clear though?
|
| I'm unaware of it ever having been tested and upheld in court
| in a SoT situation. And while it's easy to argue that it should
| be upheld because that's what the license says, it's also just
| as easy to argue that it shouldn't. Because it's easy to argue
| that a chain of derivation loses all meaning under copyright
| law once there are no recognizable elements of the original
| work. Quite simply, making a claim of copyright infringement
| requires elements of the original being used. If no original
| elements exist, then no license can bind, no matter what path
| it took to get there. Just because you put something in a
| license doesn't mean it's enforceable.
| gumby wrote:
| Yes, I think it's pretty clear (though yes, a lawyer can
| bring anything up). The basis is the propriety code case I
| mentioned which has been well litigated over the decades, its
| clear definition of "derived work" (in particular for the ToS
| case, not calling into it) and the implication of derivation
| vs clean room (discussed by others in this thread).
|
| When people try to attack the GPL in court it's typically
| over it being a contract of adhesion, enforceability, or
| applicability of calling into it (none of which are an issue
| in this discussion). The aspects I mention above are too well
| trodden.
|
| (I'm talking about the USA only, of course, and I assume you,
| the author of the post are too).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-10 23:00 UTC)