What I wasn't sure of is, as long as I never actually incorporate the original code, if basing your fundamental design on something counts as infringement. I fi

What I wasn't sure of is, as long as I never actually incorporate the original code, if basing your fundamental design on something counts as infringement. I find it hard to see the difference between taking some class definitions and changing the variable names and going off to use what you learned from other people only to realize you arrived at the same design as they did because doing anything else would mean the implementation would be worse than what you now know it could be. I don't have much of an understanding of copyright when it comes to cases like those, but my worry is that declaring that your open-source codebase is merely inspired by codebase X with this specific code in the case of these specific data structures would still count as infringement in a court of law. However, I don't intend to infringe on the licenses of the original, and do not intend to directly copy any code.