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I am developing a piece of software. The software is based on a piece of open source software. My question is how much must be changed / edited before I can call it my own? Also how do you classify how much is changed?

The code I'm building on is BY-NC-ND but if the code is still not technically my own (I did not write it) morally do you think I should provide some credit?

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    AFAIK As long as your work is based on the work of someone else, it will always be a derived work. Even when you replace 100% of the code, the fact that you gradually evolved it based on the work of someone else means that it still is derived. But I can't find a good source for this ATM.
    – Philipp
    Jun 24, 2015 at 19:20
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    To show why this is a derivative work, think about why you are not building from scratch: because it's easier to build on their work, even if you intend to eventually replace it entirely. That is exactly the reason why it is still a derivative work: you work from the base that is provided by the original code.
    – Martijn
    Jun 24, 2015 at 19:30

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The code you're building on in BY-NC-ND, which requires attribution, forbids commercial use, and disallowed derivatives.

If you build on that code, it's a derivative, which is not allowed by the license. Even if you gradually replace everything, it is still a derivative.

Anything you change you can call your own, but the resulting work will always be a combined work of the original work and your changes, even if none of the original code remains.

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    Thanks, I'm not far into the project so I may just restart.
    – Trevor Clarke
    Jun 24, 2015 at 19:31
  • Actually, if you replace everything, the result is no longer a derivative. Historical example: ATT Unix to BSD. But it can be quite difficult to prove that all of the original bits are gone and not just transformed.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jun 25, 2015 at 0:39
  • @Gilles what you're saying seems to contradict the accepted answer here. Perhaps you meant to clarify that the replacement process must be a clean-room implementation?
    – congusbongus
    Jun 25, 2015 at 9:20
  • @congusbongus There's no contradiction. The replacement process does not have to be a clean-room implementation. However, if it isn't, it's hard to defend against charges of copyright infringement. If the project history shows that B the result of modifying A, this creates a presumption that B is a derivative of A. Even if B was implemented by looking at A and not reusing it directly, this sets a presumption in the wrong direction. Making sure that B was written without looking at A reverses the presumption: A would have to find some evidence of infringement.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jun 25, 2015 at 10:11
  • @congusbongus The test is "was any copyright infringed," not "how did you do the rewrite?" Clean-room implementation is just a tool to make it easier to prove no copyright infringement exists; the critical effect is that there is a written record of everything which was carried over from one work to the next work, which (hopefully) you can argue contains nothing that is copyrightable as a matter of law. But you can establish that nothing copyrightable was copied over without that; it's just much harder.
    – cpast
    Jul 8, 2015 at 5:54

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