Forking PyPI package

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 10:31 AM, Wiktor <look at signature.invalid> wrote:
> I see few scenarios:
>
> 1) I'm trying to contact with original script's author, and send him my
> propositions of changes in code. (Oh, one more thing: my code isn't
> backward compatible, and I don't know Py2 that much to include all those
> try/except, so it could be Py2+Py3 compatible). He decides, if he wants to
> release it as Py3 only version, or combine it with his script and release
> Py2+Py3 common version.
>
> 2) I'm not contacting with him, and I'm forking his project on GitHub
>    a) under the same name? - probably bad idea
>    b) under new name (e.g. py3pwdhash)?
> Of course all credits about original author stay in code / setup.py.
>
> 2.1) After forking on GitHub, I'm creating new package on PyPI
>    a) under old name, but different version number, and new description?
>    b) under new name, to not confuse users?

Unfortunately, you're not legally allowed to just fork it and make
your own derivative work, because the original author hasn't put
license terms on the project. As it's been posted on github, we can
guess that the intention was probably for it to be open source, but
your first action has to be to contact the author and ask about
license.

If you absolutely can't get in touch with him, the only option is to
go back to the original protocol and manually reimplement it,
completely ignoring this code. It's sad but true; some code dies
because of a trivial thing like "Oops, I forgot to actually say that
this is MIT-licensed".

(At least, I can't see a license anywhere on github there. If you can
find another copy of the same code somewhere else, posted by its
author, and including a license, then your job is easier.)

ChrisA