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Comment by vfsignal | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. It would also be good of this Rust project to state that all of the utils are original works and no one has peeked at the C sources. Perhaps the maintainers of the C versions should do the same in reverse.

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https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/search?q=gnu "This is the way it was implemented in GNU split." i dunno maybe there are cases where they copy more than behavior... but interesting to look through

There are more examples, here is one:

  // a few global constants as used in the GNU implementation

It's pretty easy to ask someone "Hey, can you go take a look at GNU split and see how they handle this case?" and then implement your own clean-room solution afterwards.

Alternately, to solve the problem yourself and mention it to someone and have them say "that's how GNU split does it, so why not?"

Isn't that, by definition, not a clean-room solution?

‘Clean-room reverse engineering’ refers to the practice of having one person look at disassembled source code, spec sheets, actual behaviour, etc. of some program; describe that behaviour to a second person; and having the second person implement the described behaviour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Reverse_engineeri...

Ah, that's interesting! I didn't know that was a sufficient insulation of IP.

yea seems pretty easy then right, sounds like no source that is available for eyes to see is safe from 'clean room reverse engineering'

> Perhaps the maintainers of the C versions should do the same in reverse.

Nitpick: they don't need to, they can just attribute the Rust developers if needed. They can also just take MIT code and publish it under GPL (reverse is not true).

Taking MIT code and re-licensing it under the GPL will cause a huge uproar:

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070913014315

I'm not sure that is even legal.

It's doable if you can get OK from every single copyright owner of the source files.

LLVM did it. Switching from "University of Illinois/NCSA" to "APL 2.0".

But not without some big discussions.

I didn't mean re-licensing it - the parts that are under MIT stay under MIT, but the patches on it have a different license. That is completely legal and license doesn't forbid this. (ianal, yadda yadda...)

A similar thing happened to OpenOffice / LibreOffice: [0]

> OpenOffice uses the Apache License, whereas LibreOffice uses a dual LGPLv3/Mozilla Public license.

> For some legal reasons, then, anything OpenOffice does can be incorporated into LibreOffice, the terms of the license permit that. But if LibreOffice adds something, take font embedding, for example, OpenOffice can’t legally incorporate that code.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2020/11/02/openoffice-or-libreoffice-a-...

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