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ericlagergren / go-coreutils

A cross-platform port of GNU's coreutils to Go
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Should we keep the old license? #99

Closed rdeusser closed 7 years ago

rdeusser commented 9 years ago

Should we keep the license on the files merged from gonix or change it to what go-coreutils uses? Brought up here: https://github.com/EricLagerg/go-coreutils/pull/98

ericlagergren commented 9 years ago

I'll email Polegone and see what he thinks. Until then, we should keep the licenses. It wasn't all his work, and his contributors contributed the work under certain licenses. Now, if you rewrite the work to where it's indistinguishable from the original, then you can, I believe, change the license. For instance, I think your base64 rewrite might

qualify.

Eric Lagergren ericlagergren.com

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 8:04 AM, Robert Deusser notifications@github.com wrote:

Should we keep the license on the files merged from gonix or change it to what go-coreutils uses? Brought up here: #98

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rdeusser commented 9 years ago

I think that's fair. Any maintenance done should stay under the original license. What if for the most part the work was completely rewritten, but a small amount of the old code is still used? Does that justify a new license?

ericlagergren commented 9 years ago

I think so. I'm not a lawyer, but a rewrite should be fine. I added a line in CONTRIBUTING.md about author names -- basically, even if it's a rewrite, add your name under theirs. As for copyright (e.g., (c) John Doe, 2015), I think we should open an issue for each copyright change.