[lug] Re: recycling code [WAS Fwd: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" ]

[Nate Duehr]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 11:39:42AM -0700, Matt Clauson wrote:
> I'm sorry if I'm ranting too hard, and I'm not directing a personal attack at 
> you.  However, it appears to me that you're making this extremely hard when 
> it doesn't have to be -- there's plenty of OSS apps out there that have lots 
> of good code in them.  You don't have to write all new code for your new 
> mailreader PIMP (Pimp Is More than Pine) when you can take the editor 
> functions from Pico, the POP and IMAP code from Mutt, and toss it all 
> together?  Yes, you'll have to give credits to other projects, if not 
> specific people...  But they'll have saved you a lot of time NOT reinventing 
> the wheel, and you can work on getting whatever feature (oh joy, it prints my 
> mail out in BINARY) that you want.

Where the rubber really hits the road is when you take LICENSES into
consideration.  There's many different licenses that code can be
released under and many times you may not wish to re-use someone else's
code because it's under some silly draconian license that has silly
requirements in it.

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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