[ILUG] Gaining experience through code, and reusing experience.

[Turloch O'Tierney]

ILUG,

The company I work for makes extensive use of linux, and has released
PHP development support in its products.

I vaguely understand the BSD, GPL and LGPL licenses.

As a developer I am going into new areas. How much am I constrained by
copyright once I go beyond published API, examples and code in the
public domain, of which there seems very little? I am currently
interested in developing for eclipse.org as part of my commercial
work.

My extreme answer is:
It all depends on the license. If the source code was proprietary you
would not even get to look at it, so consider yourself signing a
nondisclosure agreement when you are looking at it and not submitting
patches.

The less extreme answer is:
Programmers learn from everywhere, your past experience is what is
paid for and that includes having a vague idea how to do things from
having read open source, and previous companies proprietary code +
coded.

This may be flame war stuff and a lawyer would give me the best
answer, but I thought I would spin it out there to get what the
current developer practice is...

Thank you for your time,

Turloch