[PD-dev] Porting, copyright and licensing

[Jamie Bullock]

Marc,

On Wed, 4 Jan 2006 10:42:36 -0500
Marc Lavallée <marc at 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