[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Licensing issue in OpenLayers package (already in Fedora)

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 08/08/2009 01:20 PM, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha) wrote:
> Any thoughts on this solution? Is that legally possible?
> 
> If so, I'll try to contact the writer of the Python implementation to
> see if he is willing to relicense his script.

Sorry for the delay here, not sure how this fell off my radar.

So, it is legally possible to do a clean room reimplementation of this
code, but it does not look like that is what happened with the existing
jsmin.py.

Basically, what someone would have to do is to write a version of jsmin,
looking only at an "algorithm description", but never jsmin.c.

Red Hat Legal compared this jsmin.py to the jsmin.c code, and it is
their opinion that it is not a clean-room reimplementation, but rather a
"conscious" translation from C to Python.

If I had to guess, if pressed, the jsmin.py author will admit to having
looked at jsmin.c.

So, you can either find someone to make a jsmin in a clean room
reimplementation, then use it, or rework your package to not use it.

~spot