That is true. However, the copyright holders will be required to go after ALL infringing derivative works if they decided to come after me in this case, as copyright is only upheld (in the US) if it is equally enforced (patents, on the other hand, may be selectively enforced.) Further, the code I am writing is substantially different in architecture. What may be similar could be some of the algorithms used but which I have not had a chance to evaluate. I consider the license of this code to be of little importance to me as no one has ever gained profit from it, shown interest in doing so, or made plans to do so. When there is no money involved, there is little incentive for people to throw a fit. The worst that could happen is that someone forces me to change the license to the GPL. Makes no difference to me. The only reason I am not GPL-ing it is because GPL is too restrictive - there may be bits of my code which someone DOES find commercially viable, and they will be welcome to use it and modify it, as long as I don't have to give up my license to my own code in the process. -----Original Message----- From: netrek-dev-bounces at us.netrek.org [mailto:netrek-dev-bounces at us.netrek.org] On Behalf Of Trent Piepho Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 7:10 PM To: Netrek Development Mailing List Subject: Re: [netrek-dev] Windows C# client 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. _______________________________________________ netrek-dev mailing list netrek-dev at us.netrek.org http://mailman.us.netrek.org/mailman/listinfo/netrek-dev