Okay thanks James Taylor and Urias McCullough.
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 2:20 AM, Urias McCullough <umccullough@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 1:42 PM, Dewey <james.dewey.taylor@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Reverse_engineering
Not specifically reverse engineering, but it's what would be called a
clean-room reimplementation. One person or group documents the existing
code and another writes new code based on the documentation. This allows
new code to be written and released under any license without infringing
the license of the existing code. At least two participants/groups MUST be
involved because the person(s) writing new code cannot be allowed to see
the old code whatsoever to prevent inadvertently writing code that is too
similar to the original code.
There is another option...
If the code in question is relatively small, and copyright by one or two
people only - you may be able to just contact them and ask permission to
relicense it under MIT/BSD or similar for your project.
Sometimes that's all that is needed.
If, on the other hand, the copyright has been assigned to some larger
body, and they are anal about GPL licensing, you may have to do the clean
room implementation or find another similar version that is licensed the
way you want.
- Urias
