Oow wow, For my hobbies, I would like to stay as far away from lawyers as possible.. :) If the original creators of the Octave Control Systems Toolbox don't want to specifically allow it, I'll just have to do without.. Greetz, Jasper On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Bruce Southey <bsouthey@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Really this is legal advice that you need from a lawyer (and I'm not one). However, there are resources that can help you. I would suggest first browsing Software Freedom Law Center's guide: "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects" which is available at http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html. Also the viewpoint on using BSD licenses in GPL code
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html .
If you use someone's code (or pseudo code for that matter) in some way then you are bound by the terms of the code. Just looking at the code (or pseudo code) is probably sufficient to the licensing terms to be valid (especially with software patents involved). Here you are not looking at the algorithm that might be controlled by some license but an actual expression of that algorithm which is controlled by the authors copyrights and consequently the license. Thus, the need for clean room design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design).
Regards Bruce
Alan G Isaac wrote:
On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Jasper Stolte apparently wrote:
I'm not quite sure how this licensing stuff works. The algorithms are all public domain afaik, Octave made some implementation of them in C++. The class structure of this toolbox will be totally different, it's even written in a whole other language. Is it forbidden for us to look at how they implemented it without going to GPL?
Safest is not to look. And ask the author to release under BSD. (Sometimes s/he will.)
But this seems an interesting case, if you accurately describe it.
When you say the algorithm is in the public domain, does that mean that you know of a public domain implementation in code or in pseudocode?
Cheers, Alan Isaac
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