[fpc-devel] 2.0.4-rc3 available

[Jonas Maebe]

On 15 Aug 2006, at 13:29, Marco van de Voort wrote:

>> On 15 Aug 2006, at 12:41, Jonas Maebe wrote:
>>
>>> Not only passing them on, but to re-license them under the GPL or
>>> (modified) LGPL.
>>
>> Or pretty much any other Open Source/Free Software license for that
>> matter...
>
> I was thinking more for reference, and less for reuse.

The problem is that if you use source code "for reference", your  
source code automatically gets tainted by the original one. To be  
clean you would need someone to write reference documentation based  
on the original source code, and other people reading this  
documentation to write their own implementation (like Phoenix did  
with the original IBM Bios).

An ok from Alan to only license our "derived" source code under any  
open source license would be equivalent to a license to distribute  
his original source code under that license (since you can't define  
how much this derived work should differ). We could have some sort of  
"gentlemen's agreement" that we will only distribute our own  
implementation, but I'm not sure how that could be written down.

Maybe after it is written, Alan could approve to distribute whatever  
copyrighted material from him still present in that end result under  
our license of choice, but I don't know if there is a way to do it  
beforehand besides giving us full permission and trusting we won't  
abuse it (or giving us no redistribution permission and us hoping  
that we will get that permission at one point in the future for the  
derived work).


Jonas