[Project-managers] editing external codes

[Ted Ralphs]

Stefan Vigerske wrote:

> If you distribute code via svn, then you have to put is unter the CPL
> (or at least something compatible). I don't know if this will be ok in
> your case, i.e., if the GPL is compatible with the CPL.

Just to be clear, legally, we can redistribute anything that is under an
open-source license (including GPL) in source form. The compatibility of
licenses is not really an issue unless you want to distribute binaries.
In general, you cannot distribute binaries that include both GPL'd and
CPL'd code.

It is COIN policy, however, that everything in your project must be
under a single license, so you should not add GPL'd code to your
project's svn repository, even if you don't plan on distributing binaries.

Under special circumstances, COIN might agree to distribute modified
versions of other open source projects from a separate SVN repository,
but as Andreas pointed out, getting the developers to incorporate your
patches is the best approach. The next best is to provide a script that
downloads the code from an external source and automatically patches it,
as as discussed by Stefan. Of course, this won't work too well in
MSVC++. Those users would need to apply the patch by hand, I guess.

Cheers,

Ted
-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Lehigh University
(610)758-4784
tkralphs at lehigh.edu
www.lehigh.edu/~tkr2