Re: gtkpool licensing

[Walter Landry <landry@physics.utah.edu>]

> On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 04:09:38PM -0400, Jacques Fortier wrote:
> > > I'm going to packaging gtkpool for Debian, and I was wondering about this
> > > part of the gtkpool README file:
> > >
> > >   The code for this game is based on code from
> > >   _Java(tm) Game Programming for Dummies(R)_ by
> > >   Wayne Holder and Doug Bell, (I know, I know,
> > >   but it was the only book the library had on
> > >   game programming, so give me a break, OK? :) )
> > >
> > >   All the modifications to that code were
> > >   performed by Jacques Fortier (that's me).
> > >
> > > If those two people wrote the code that you modified, they have copyright on
> > > it. What is the license of their code? There is no evidence that it is GPL.
> > 
> > I got the book out of the library a while ago, so I don't remember much
> > about the license. I believe that they allowed you to use their code, but
> > I'm not sure what restrictions, if any, they imposed. I'm usually pretty
> > honest about such things, so I suspect what I was doing was allowed under
> > the terms of their license. That was three years ago though, so I'm not
> > really sure anymore.
> > 
> > What I can tell you for sure is that no original code remains in the game.
> > Although the general structure and a few algorithms are based on their
> > code, all the C++ code was written by myself. I have placed all of my code
> > under the GPL.
> 
> Ah, hmm. I guess that's fine then, but I suppose someone with more knowledge
> of the law will comment (added CC:).

If the guy doesn't have any of the original code in the program, it
should be fine.  There might be a question about the "general
structure and few algorithms", but that amount of code reuse probably
falls under fair use.  The author might want to make it more explicit
in the README.  He could say something like 

  The code for this game is originally based on code from
  _Java(tm) Game Programming for Dummies(R)_ by
  Wayne Holder and Doug Bell (I know, I know,
  but it was the only book the library had on
  game programming, so give me a break, OK? :) ),
  but has been entirely rewritten by Jacques Fortier
  (that's me).

But that is not required.

Regards,
Walter Landry
landry@physics.utah.edu