Marc,
On Wed, 4 Jan 2006 10:42:36 -0500 Marc Lavallée marc@hacklava.net wrote:
Le 4 Janvier 2006 05:51, Jamie Bullock a écrit :
Hi,
Whilst we are on the subject of licensing and copyright, I have a related question. If a section of code is ported into another programming language, does the ported code qualify as a new piece of software or a modification of existing software? I ask this, because clearly it has implications for who owns the copyright to the ported code.
<snip>
The ACM license is a bit like a the CC attribution/non-commercial license. I'm not sure it can be considered a free software license (it's not listed on gnu.org), but I believe it can be used along with free software. For commercial use, you must contact the author and negociate a licensing agreement. For non-commercial use, you can distribute the source or binaries, even modify and/or integrate the source to your project, but the original code must be indentified as being the property of ACM. So I think you can licence your part as GPL and use the ACM part as instructed by the ACM license. -- Marc
Thanks for the reply. What you mention above is was what I already understood to be the case. However, the emphasis of my question is: does a port from one language to another generally count as new software, or modification of existing software from a licensing/copyright point of view?
For example, if I re-wrote PD in Java (heaven forbid), and it was functionally identical to PD, would it have to retain its original copyright/license, or would it be considered a new piece of software?
Jamie