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Perhaps someone with some experience dealing with violations of MIT licenses can chime in on this. How different does one project's code have to be from anothe

Perhaps someone with some experience dealing with violations of MIT licenses can chime in on this. How different does one project's code have to be from another similar project before you can claim copyright and slap your own license on it? If a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough?

Xylakant 6y ago
> if a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough? This would most definitely not be enough. That would basically make all licenses useless - commercial and noncommercial alike. The MIT license is no different than any other license in that regard. In case of the MIT license, whenever I copy any code (files or parts), I always place a comment right next to the section, pointing to the source of the copy and containing the license of the code/copyright marker. Honestly, what’s the cost? My ego doesn’t take a hit from admitting that I found and adapted something useful. The possible uses of the code are unaffected. License situation is clarified for audits. The original author gets credit for their work. There’s only upsides.
tjader 6y ago
AFAIK there is no amount of changes you can make to a work that will make it stop being a derivative work. That's why reimplementations of license-encumbered software have to be careful to have one team study the software that is to be reimplemented and describe what it does and another teams reads this specification and implements the substitute without ever looking at the original software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
- Xylakant 6y ago
  and even that may prove problematic, as oracle vs google shows.

Xylakant 6y ago

> if a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough? This would most definitely not be enough. That would basically make all licenses useless - commercial and noncommercial alike. The MIT license is no different than any other license in that regard. In case of the MIT license, whenever I copy any code (files or parts), I always place a comment right next to the section, pointing to the source of the copy and containing the license of the code/copyright marker. Honestly, what’s the cost? My ego doesn’t take a hit from admitting that I found and adapted something useful. The possible uses of the code are unaffected. License situation is clarified for audits. The original author gets credit for their work. There’s only upsides.

tjader 6y ago

AFAIK there is no amount of changes you can make to a work that will make it stop being a derivative work. That's why reimplementations of license-encumbered software have to be careful to have one team study the software that is to be reimplemented and describe what it does and another teams reads this specification and implements the substitute without ever looking at the original software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Xylakant 6y ago
and even that may prove problematic, as oracle vs google shows.