I have a contributor on our project (RDF4J) who has submitted a
patch which includes a modified copy of a method taken from the
OpenJDK source code. It mentions this fact in the code comments.
The method in question is quite basic (it's a conversion from
codepoint integers to chars, all in all about 15 lines of code).
The modification of the original is an optimization for our
specific purposes (avoiding creation of a lot of internal string
arrays).
The OpenJDK source code is licensed under GPL, and as I
understand its terms, inclusion of a (modified) copy of GPL code
would require us to distribute the entire project under GPL (which
is clearly not what we want).
So the question is: at which point does such a "modified copy" of
GPL code become significant enough that it no longer counts as
simple 'citation'? Are there allowances in the number of lines
and/or the fundamental simplicity of the algorithm that would
enable us to accept this patch?
The contribution in question (including discussion) can be seen
here:
https://github.com/eclipse/rdf4j/pull/571
Regards,
Jeen