[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: The FAQ aren't clear for me on this : incl

[Tom Morris <tfmorris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Edoardo Comar wrote:

> ** I am not expecting legal advice here **
> Just an opinion please.

Well, you're asking for an opinion about a legal document (the EPL) and 
applicable copyright law, so it certainly sounds like legal advice to 
me.  If there's an economic/legal risk, you should ask your lawyer.  If 
there's no risk, flip a coin.

Here's my non-lawyer opinion about your question...

> I wasn't able to clarify whether snippets of Eclipse/EPL code can be 
> used/modified in a commercial program redistributed in object from only.
>
> The FAQ only say that *if* source is redistributed, then the source that 
> originated from EPL sources must be licensed under EPL.

The FAQ isn't the controlling document, the license (EPL) is.  The 
license says that sources for any derivative works created from EPL code 
must be distributed.

You could claim a "fair use" exception if the "snippets" are small 
enough, but that's a very gray area and the courts weight a whole bunch 
of factors like total size, % of overall work, use, economic impact, 
etc, etc.  You might have seen guidelines from various projects that say
anything more than NN lines of code requires a contributors agreement 
and you could try to pick a number out of the air like that as well, but 
it's really not that simple.

Your followup gives examples of "snippets" (some of which are pretty 
non-snippety to may way of thinking), so here's my gut reaction to them:

- Class - definitely not fair use
- Method - probably not fair use unless its a small/trivial method
- Lines - probably fair use as long as it's not too many lines (whatever 
"too many" means)

Tom