Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jakejake 4995 days ago
The author writes about his love of contributing to open source, but since his code has no license this may not even be open source code at all. The author should put some kind of license with his code so that it is used the way he wishes. If he wants credit, there are attribution licenses out there. GPL may help to get contributions back to your code. Different licenses will have different results.

Also, hypothetically, if the official API was GPL and he used that as a starting point - in fact he could be the one in violation of the GPL for not including copyright info in his code.
1 comments
praptak 4995 days ago
> if the official API was GPL

Assuming APIs are copyrightable to start with. There is no broad ruling that they aren't (except maybe in EU: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120502083035371 ) but Oracle tried to claim copyright on APIs and failed.

link
narcissus 4994 days ago
Isn't the Oracle case more about the definition of an API (what I would consider to be the header files, for example), versus this, which is more of an implementation of an API, though?
link
jakejake 4994 days ago
Agreed, I should have clarified that I meant hypothetically if the author started out with some example code that was supplied by the API owner under the GPL.
link