IANAL,
so I imagine since you’re concerned you should really talk
to one. Having said that, I don’t see an issue with this
code. The original JDK code has a different method signature
(arrays vs StringBuilder), which makes the code literally
quite different. The only literal copies are these 3 lines:
if (Character.isBmpCodePoint(codePoint))
{
} else
if (Character.isValidCodePoint(codePoint))
{
throw
new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid codepoint
" + codePoint);
Taking
each line in isolation, it’s inconceivable that they would
cause an issue, because there is no other way to invoke
those methods on Character. If Oracle objects to someone
putting Character.isXXXCodePoint() in an if-statement, I’d
be curious to understand why they’d provide the method in
the first place. And the exception is common place.
So
that only leaves the overall structure (the
if-else-elseThrow construct). The structure would be
considered ordinary to anyone familiar with code points.
Again,
just my take on this (and I don’t speak for anyone but
myself). I’d be curious to hear from the Eclipse IP team (de
minimis and all that).
Thanks
Moh
I have a contributor on our project (RDF4J) who has
submitted a patch which includes a modified copy of a method
taken from the OpenJDK source code. It mentions this fact in
the code comments.
The method in question is quite basic (it's a conversion
from codepoint integers to chars, all in all about 15 lines
of code). The modification of the original is an
optimization for our specific purposes (avoiding creation of
a lot of internal string arrays).
The OpenJDK source code is licensed under GPL, and as I
understand its terms, inclusion of a (modified) copy of GPL
code would require us to distribute the entire project under
GPL (which is clearly not what we want).
So the question is: at which point does such a "modified
copy" of GPL code become significant enough that it no
longer counts as simple 'citation'? Are there allowances in
the number of lines and/or the fundamental simplicity of the
algorithm that would enable us to accept this patch?
The contribution in question (including discussion) can be
seen here:
https://github.com/eclipse/rdf4j/pull/571
Regards,
Jeen
