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Re: [patch]: Removing duplicate functions, part 3 (and brief copyright question)
On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 02:32:01PM +0100, Paolo Carlini wrote:
> Chris Jefferson wrote:
>
> >On a different note, are there offical guidelines on copying code?
> >I've been writing a (very small, very limited) preprocessor library so
> >I can macroise <tuple>, after a week of fun I had managed to create
> >all the functionality I needed except for an O(1) equality testing
> >macro. I knew that boost had one, so I decided to go and have a look
> >to see how they did it. However now I've seen the "trick", I can't
> >think of any other real way of implementing it than basically exactly
> >the same code line-for-line...
>
> Eh, this is a mine field, in general, but with boost things should be
> easy. Why don't you contact directly the author of that code, while
> waiting for feedbacks?!?
The Boost license specifically allows importing its code, but you would
need to incorporate their copyright notice too. The author might allow
a less intrusive inclusion, such as "thanks to Joe for ...", or even
less.
Legally, if there's really only one reasonable way to express a
technical idea, then it is not covered by copyright. As Paolo notes,
though, that may be hard to prove for the case of anything complicated;
it might just be one's own lack of imagination.
Nathan Myers
ncm@cantrip.org