Mind if I read your code?

[Richard Sharpe]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Juan Lang wrote:

> Hi folks, I'm working on some (LGPL-licensed and
> BSD-licensed) SMB code for Wine.  So far I've stayed
> away from reading the Samba code much because I don't
> want to create concerns that I'm taking from it.  I'm
> hoping it's okay with you all if I read it for
> inspiration from time to time?

Here is my take. Copyright does not protect ideas. It protects expressions 
of ideas. Thus the GPL protects the code. If you reimplement, and I mean 
re-implement, you should be OK to read the code. However, a better way to 
do it is to have one person read the code and extract the algoritm in 
words, and have another person do the reimpl from the alg description.
 
> Another licensing question:  would I be able to use
> the IDL files you guys are so kindly generating for
> Samba4 in Wine?

The last I heard about this was that Andrew Tridgell wanted to use a very 
liberal licence on the IDL files, but the answer should really come from 
him.

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]ns.aus.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org, 
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com