On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 02:41:16PM -0400, Zach wrote: > On 4/9/07, Dave Ahn <ahn at orion.netrek.org> wrote: > > If you are doing a clean-room implementation of a new Netrek client, the > > recommendations I have, which are strong ones, are to 1) publish your > > source under a real open source license, such as GPL or BSD, and your > > documentation under a real open document license; and, 2) properly > > attribute the basis of your work. > > Good luck, and welcome to the list. > I thought if a client is written from scratch then it is under no > prior license restrictions. They can use whatever license they want > right? Cliff plans on using the BSD license I think. Writing from scratch is an unusal description for a protocol that I do not believe to be well documented. :-) I suggest that Dave is speaking about offering credit to the original authors of any works that are used as a reference for re-implementation. Even if not legally required, it is a gesture of goodwill that would avoid people being upset, such as Trent on a similar issue. In terms of legality, it is grey. If I could prove in a court of law that your code was originally mine, it doesn't matter if you change the names of a few variables, or changing the indentation. This came up with the recent SCO claims to UNIX, and therefore Linux. In a true clean-room implementation, the coders would preferably have never seen the code they are re-implementing. If I can prove that my coders have never even looked at the software, than any similarities could be more easily written off as coincidence, or common programmer methodologies or patterns. For Netrek, I doubt that you could write a Netrek client without using another implementation as a reference. It might be re-architected, but the content will be the same. Cheers, mark -- mark at mielke.cc / markm at ncf.ca / markm at nortel.com __________________________ . . _ ._ . . .__ . . ._. .__ . . . .__ | Neighbourhood Coder |\/| |_| |_| |/ |_ |\/| | |_ | |/ |_ | | | | | | \ | \ |__ . | | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__ | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them... http://mark.mielke.cc/