From:
<incubation-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Jeen Broekstra <jeen.broekstra@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Discussions for new Eclipse projects <incubation@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday 16 September 2016 at 00:06
To: "incubation@xxxxxxxxxxx" <incubation@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [incubation] reusing (modified) GPL code: at which length does this become a problem?
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
