[PD-dev] Porting, copyright and licensing

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, Jamie Bullock wrote:

> 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?

It depends on who the owners of the code are and how much they pay their 
lawyers.

It depends on how easily it can be argued that it's actually a different
program. It depends on how much the code has changed while translating,
and possibly also on how much it _had_ to be changed while translating.

Which flavour of Fortran is it coded in? If it's coded in a F77 style, 
chances are that it looks a lot like C. If it's Fortran IV you may have 
more opportunity to make your code look different.

> For example, I have written an external that uses a Fast Cosine
> Transform algorithm originally implemented in Fortran, with the code
> released under the ACM license

Repeating Marc's question, why do you need to code a FCT/DCT yourself? Is
there a problem with the currently available free FFT implementations? You 
might be able to dodge the problem entirely if you use libfftw3.so 
instead.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada