[License-discuss] Category "B" licenses at Apache

[David Woolley]

On 26/08/15 01:45, Tzeng, Nigel H. wrote:
> Larry,
>
> Scenario A:   I’m looking for an example in my codebase on how to do Foo
> (of course) and I find a code snippet to do roughly what I want.  I cut
> and paste it into where I need it, modify it slightly and move on.
>   Developers do this all the time.

The purpose of open source is to allow them to do this legally.  Coders 
who do this all the time on published code that doesn't have an open 
source type licence are continually infringing copyright.

One of the main reasons for the GPL is to ensure a large pool of code 
that cane be re-used and re-purposed, whilst, at the same time ensuring 
that the resulting code goes back into the pool.
>
> Scenario B:  I am debugging some code and find a spot where an if test
> should be <= bar rather than < bar.  I fix it while inside the debugger

That change is going to have insufficient creative content to have any 
copyright associated with it.  So all you have demonstrated there is 
that your organisation's configuration control procedures are broken and 
their ISO 9000 status may need revoking.  In any case, typical copyleft 
licences permit the use of modified versions within an organisation.

> without realizing that it was in the Category B module.  Since I’m
> modifying the Apache product quite a bit anyway was not immediately
> obvious that when I checked my changes into the local repo for the
> Apache product that I made a change in the Category B module.  Maybe I
> simply never knew or had forgotten that I had to be aware there was a
> category B module.

I believe another intent of the GPL Is that people should be able to 
debug and repair the code that they possess.
>