[OT] [PD] licensing

[pix]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002 11:43:30 +0100
Krzysztof Czaja <czaja at chopin.edu.pl> wrote:

> what license would be the most appropriate for a `vexing' library
> of Pd externals, that I am going to release this week, and in which
> I use snippets from GPLed sfront, MITed Csound, and Pd?  The code
> is either written from scratch, or completely rewritten, _but_
> after careful reading of sfront, Csound, and Pd code -- and it shows.

does this kind of situation even get covered by these open source
licenses? if it does then it sounds like a kind of automatic patent, which
i'm pretty sure it isn't.

one thing i always found strange about these licences is that they really
only cover the monkey-work of software engineering. i'm not sure if there
is anything stopping a company from getting another monkey to
'reinterpret' some open source code and close the resulting project.

i have heard that it is possible to patent and algorithm and donate the
patent to the FSF (who i assume will only allow use by GPL projects) - if
the above were not possible this would never be necessary.

pix.