Black Duck Sample Code Snippet License Issue

[Alfred63]

Greetings.

Our company recently purchased a product called "Black Duck" which goes through all of (our) code base and searches for any license related issues of using GPL code or snippets of LGPL code.

Well it turns out that one of our source files contains a snippet of code from the one of JFreeCharts example/demo source files.

If I understand the rules correctly, I cannot take a LGPL source file and use it in a commercial product. There are things I could do to become legal but it would no longer be a commercial product.

So I am here asking if the same rules apply for a snippet of code from your demo source code. I'm assuming it does, and I'm about to rewrite the offending file before it is released.

Any information you can provide is greatly appreciated.

The other aspect of this, and this is just a general question, is whether it is typical to put example / demo code under a LGPL? It would seem to me that usage of API classes are almost guaranteed to have code that looks the same regardless of whether someone just copy and pasted. Just thinking out lout here...

-Dennis

(I wanted to add that I have indeed purchased at least two of David's documentation guides)

[david.gilbert]

Hi Dennis,

You'll probably find that the fair use provisions of copyright law permit you to use that "snippet", but if there is any doubt send me an e-mail identifying the code that you are using and (assuming that I wrote it) I can probably give you explicit permission to use it in your closed source app. Nowadays the demo code is just marked "(C)opyright Object Refinery Limited" and my principal goal is to preserve the "value" of the demo collection (as a whole), which you can only get by purchasing the JFreeChart Developer Guide.

The demos are meant to show you how to achieve certain results with JFreeChart, so I expect snippets to find their way into other people's code and it isn't my intention to chase everyone for copyright infringement when that happens (and it is my understanding that the "fair use" provisions should cover that anyway).

I hope that helps, but e-mail me at david.gilbert@object-refinery.com if you want to go into more detail.

[Alfred63]

Hi David,

I will contact our people here but to be fair I think I will pull the offending file and either delete or rewrite if possible.

I am sure it will make the people above less paranoid.

Thanks David.

I will be emailing you about something else shortly.

-Dennis