On Mon, 9 Apr 2007, ChronosWS wrote: > I was unclear when I made my statement. By 'clean' I meant the code was > being rewritten from scratch. I am using the Netrek XP 2006 v1.2 codebase > as a reference for the protocol and behaviors, but not using the code. The > new code will be released under BSD with proper attribution. Sorry for the > confusion. Appropriate files will be checked into source control shortly. The copyright holders of the code you are using as a reference as you write "new" code could claim your code is a derived work. If there is any similarity, they can say that is evidence that you copied from them, and since you had their original in hand as you wrote it, they would have a very good case. This is the point of a clean room re-implementation. Never having seen the original code is a very good argument that you didn't copy it. There was recently a big to-do about a Linux broadcom wireless driver being plagerized to make a freebsd driver. The argument that once the cut-and-pasted code from the Linux driver was "removed" it would be an original BSD licensed work free of the GPL is utter BS. When you cut-and-paste someone else's work into yours, it's a dervied work. Change the variable names and it's still a derived work. Go through the code line by line and _change_ it so it looks different, and it's still a derived work.