How to publish paper and project inspired by Open Source Projects

Question

This is about my final project for my grade.

I did a project. I looked at similar open source projects and got influenced by them. I didn't copy them, but i definitely got influenced and some parts look similar. I have to write a paper about it and publish it. There is going to be some UML diagrams and explanation about the internals. I checked one of said open source projects and mine's structure (class relations) ended up pretty similar.

How do i properly reference the other works in the paper?

If i decide to make my project open source how do i reference the other works? It is not like i copy-pasted the code, neither did i forked them (because i am an idiot, i could've done this and built on it) or anything like that. But i got influenced by how they structured them.

The license of said project is GPL 2.0.

Answer 1

I am not a legal expert at all just a long time developer.

As per your description I do not think that you can be held liable for any infringements of your work, and as far as being 'similar'... that is a non-issue.

Gaining and deriving knowledge from others is part of the learning process everybody must go through, especially when it was gained from other open source projects.

However if you stand to gain commercially from your work then perhaps there is a slight concern... but in general, no, you should have no issues.