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