Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 30th Aug 2006 17:04 UTC, submitted by Moulinneuf
"The GNU General Public License is one of the most widely used software licenses - and, undoubtedly, the most misunderstood. Some of this misunderstanding comes from hostile propaganda, but some also comes from a lack of experience in licensing issues on the part of both lawyers and lay users, and the use of standard language in conventional end-user license agreements that are unthinkingly coupled with the GPL. In all cases, the confusion is frequently based on misreadings, rumors, secondhand accounts, and what is convenient to believe."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
If you take ten lines of GPL code and stick them into a ten million line code base, then the entire code base release has to be under the GPL.
This myth needs to die. Taking 10 lines of code from one program and putting them in another will virtually never cause your work to become a derivative of the work from where the 10 lines came from. This is because it is nearly impossible for 10 lines of code to meet the level of expression which is required for copyright to attach. Depending on the code, you could conceivably copy hunderds of lines of code and still not run afoul of copyright.
Additionally, the degree of copyright infringment is considered by courts. 10 lines in a 10 million line code base is such a small percentage, there is next to no chance damages would be awarded. And since it is such a small amount of code, it would be trivial to remove it, or rewrite it.
That said, I still don't recommend copying someone else's code and if you take the advice of anyone on a message board instead of consulting with a lawyer, you deserve that multi-million dollar judgement against you.