[Biococoa-dev] Joining the team

Charles PARNOT charles.parnot at stanford.edu
Mon Feb 21 18:37:41 EST 2005


>Incidentally, what's the story for re-use of code?  A hypothetical:  If I
>were to write code for a commercial project, then donate some of that code
>to BioCocoa, would I then have to go back and release the code for the
>entire commercial product?  Would I have to explicitly retain copyright to
>the shared code to avoid this?  Hasn't been an issue yet, but if we do go
>CoreData, I could see it becoming one.

If it is going to be a whole class or a bunch of class, that would be a problem. But if it is just pasting some chunks of code here and there with some modifications to avoid typing and to get an outline of something otherwise quite starightforward, then it is not much of an issue, particularly if it is very standard code that you could find in an Apple example or a tutorial (then it is not original code, so no copyright issue). I would guess what makes code original is not just how you wrote it, but the intent and the context. I am not a lawyer, of course, but this seems to be the rule of thumb.

charles

-- 
Help science go fast forward:
http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xgrid-stanford/

Charles Parnot
charles.parnot at stanford.edu

Room  B157 in Beckman Center
279, Campus Drive
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305 (USA)

Tel +1 650 725 7754
Fax +1 650 725 8021



More information about the Biococoa-dev mailing list