[jsword-devel] Re: JSword license

Joe Walker jsword-devel@crosswire.org
Wed, 01 Oct 2003 23:39:19 +0100


Personally Mike, if you've read my JSword code, I don't presume any 
ownership of the part of your brain that changed as a result, so treat 
my JSword code as documentation and then write your own code with 
whatever license you like.
This freedom may be in addition to what the GPL allows, but for the code 
that I own, you have my permission.
The bad news is I can't grant the same freedom for code that others have 
a claim over, which you can tell by looking at the @author tags, and by 
assuming that anything in org.crosswire.jsword.book.sword.* is tainted.

I think it is a shame that we end up falling out whenever the GPL is 
discussed, and each time it happens I like the GPL less.

Joe.

Mike Kienenberger wrote:

>Chris Little <chrislit@crosswire.org> wrote:
>  
>
>>This describes the creation of a derivative work.  You've used a 
>>copyrighted work to understand the format and derived a work-a-like from 
>>that.  As a result, it must be GPL licensed.  You could remove the 
>>compressed module code and just deal with the raw files, releasing the 
>>result under Apache license or something else (you could even keep it 
>>proprietary).
>>    
>>
>
>Can you provide me with a reference showing why knowing the format of the 
>data makes code using the data a derived work?  There is no commonality 
>between the c++ code used to convert an entire raw text file to a compressed 
>format and java code used to look up a particular verse.
>
>Please feel free to email me offline if this is not appropriate for the 
>mailing list.
>
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