Hacker News Reader

Is it even legal to take a GPL-licensed code, translating to Rust ensuring it is exactly compatible, and then releasing under non-GPL? I thought you would need to extract a clean-room specification from it first, and ideally have separate people extracting the specification and writing the new code.

View on HN

You can use the man pages as your reference. Another comment also mentioned a test suite. I think using that to check how equivalent your attempt is does not violate the GPL.

I had the same thought. This very much feels like a derived work. Since they (aim to) replicate the behaviour if the gnutils, and not just some generic posix utiles then I think it would be hard to argue the GPL doesn't apply in a legal sense. I think in a moral sense it very much is a violation, since the GNU authors presumably intended for their work to be built on only by further copyleft works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com