From: "Ara.T.Howard" <Ara.T.Howard@...>
Date: 2005-05-18T21:55:14+09:00
Subject: incorporating other's ruby code (licensing)


i have a lib, alib, that's full of stuff i use all the time.  it's got
utilities like Process::alive?(pid), thread safe logging, etc, etc.  i have
inlined a few small modules i find partucularly useful such as the bsearch
module written by satoru takabayashi which allows very neat things like

   irb(main):009:0> %w( a b d ).bsearch_lower_boundary {|x| x <=> "c"}
   => 2

   irb(main):010:0> %w( a b b c d f g ).bsearch_lower_boundary {|x| x <=> "e"}
   => 5

the liscense for this bit of work is

   # You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
   # the Ruby's licence.

and i've inlined this in the code.  i also have a tweaked version of jan
molic's OrderedHash and motoyuki kasahara's Find2 module.  in all cases i've
modified the code in small ways and kept the original license intact.
therefore my alib library looks something like:

   module ALib
     # my own stuff
     module Util
     end

     # my own stuff
     module Logging
     end

     # my own stuff
     module SimpleMain
     end

     # license for Find2
     module Find2
     end

     # license for Bsearch
     module Bsearch
     end

     # license for OrderedHash
     class OrderedHash
     end

     # my own stuff
     class OrderedAutoHash < OrderedHash
     end

     # etc, etc
   end

in any case i'm using my lib tons and generally putting anything i write more
than once but which does not belong elsewhere, which is just too simple/small
to be it's own lib, or which is neat bit of code that i don't want to require
people to have installed and am increasingly relying on it in my projects.
the problem is that i now must distribute it in order to release anything that
depends on it...

so, do people think inlining the original licenses in their entirty sufficient
in cases, like Bsearch, where i've subsumed another peice of work?  at what
point of modification does one stop considering a peice of work 'derived' and
simply consider it a re-implementation and therefore 'new' work?

any pointers appreciated.  btw.  my goal here is simply to share the code
while respecting the original authors intentions - i could care less what
people do with my code (although i release under ruby's license) so that's
not the issue.

cheers.

-a
-- 
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| email :: ara [dot] t [dot] howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| phone :: 303.497.6469
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