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Comment by anu_gupta | Hacker News Reader

IMO, @threedaymonk has handled this maturely and well.

https://github.com/threedaymonk/text/issues/21#issuecomment-...

> "I'm not going to port Metaphone 3 to Ruby, nor am I going to accept or merge any such ports at this time.

> Whilst the licensing of the Java code in question clearly and unambiguously permits such a port, @lphilips54's stated intentions for reuse of the code are unclear and contradictory. I can't see that any benefit would come from integrating something that is surrounded by such confusion."

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What is legal to do, and what is moral to do doesn't always match up.

I'm sure they're within their legal right to copy the code if they wanted to. But that wouldn't be the moral thing to do.

I don't think there's a clear moral component here, unless someone can demonstrate that the author would suffer actual damage from such a port. It would certainly be a little rude, though.

What's rude is granting a license and then trying to take it back after people have relied on it.

Well, he makes a living from that code. It looks like he made a mistake with the license but I don't think is morally right to sabotage his source of income just for that mistake.

> I'm sure they're within their legal right to copy the code if they wanted to.

I'm not sure they're within their legal right to do so given metaphone 3 is patented, and the BSD license does not include patent grants, so the patent grant has to be obtained separately from the license.

Is there a patent covering it? I've only seen rejected applications so far.

You've repeated this all over this thread and have yet to provide a link to a granted patent.

Indeed, Alice v CLS makes it much more difficult for algorithms to be patented in the US (though hardly impossible), and the only references to a metaphone patent in the USPTO that I or others in here have been able to find have been rejected patent attempts.

If you are going to repeat this everywhere like it is the truth, please provide clarification, because current evidence points to this being incorrect, and I'm sure everyone here would like to be corrected if our current findings are wrong

http://www.google.com/patents/US726918 ? Hmmm maybe not, the patent expired last century

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