Re: Code reuse

[Sitaram Chamarty <sitaramc@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 12:48 AM, Philip Herron
<herron.philip@googlemail.com> wrote:

> I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but
> I've been working on a personal project a programming language
> interpreter for some time now, but i took 2 code snippets from
> git-core namely:

[snip]

> I've changed it a good bit (probably doesn't resemble much of what it
> was) to fit in with the way my stuff works but is there anything i
> need to like put in my source code to say hey this is based of
> git-core, so far is just a comment to say 'based of git-core hash.c'.
> Its an open source (GPL) program but i haven't released or made much
> noise about it yet because i want to work on it more myself.

In general, the GPL's main requirement is that whoever gets the binary
should also get the code (I'm over simplifying but that's basically
it).  It actually doesn't say much about giving credit, except (from
<HEAD:COPYING>):

"If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want
its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so
that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the
original authors' reputations"

and

"a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any change."

That's basically it...

It would seem to me that, if you changed them significantly, and going
by the above logic, you don't need to do *anything* regarding
attribution.