Re-using copyrighted code

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Malte Forkel <malte.forkel at berlin.de> wrote:
> Had I known in the beginning how convoluted things would become, I might
> have considered two other options: Just publish or keep the code to
> myself.  But I still think, first understanding the legal aspects and
> then publishing (to give back at least a little) is the way to go.
>
> I certainly hope that there is no software out thre that didn't get
> released to the public because its author found the legal implications
> to difficult to handle.

Understanding is good :)

Unfortunately there will be heaps of software that didn't get released
owing to potential legal messes. It's a loss that could be partially
avoided in future by authors sticking to the well-known licenses; it's
easy to make a derivative work based on three or four different
components if they all use the same license. I've seen issues all over
the place stemming from GNU Readline (which is GPL, not LGPL) and
something not GPL-compat being both linked to the same application;
and it's so likely as to be practically certain that there have been
things left unreleased because of that.

ChrisA