[thelist] When does "bought code" become your own ?

Nicole Parrot nicole at parrot.ca
Fri May 18 10:10:02 CDT 2001


A year ago, we bought a calendar written in ASP. Turns out the person who
bought it didn't really know what to look for, so I ended up recoding at
least 50% of it. Ok, we did save some dev time, but not that much. Anyway,
the calendar now does exactly what we want it to do, and we have more
clients that want it.

The original code license prohibits sales of the code, even sales of
modifications. So the obvious solution is to write from scratch.

But once I'm faced with the ASP/SQL code, I realise that's easier said than
done. Because we have one client who currently uses our modified version, we
don't want to bring changes to the look (which is just slightly different
from the original). So I have to recode the code, but what does that entails
exactly?

Which of these solutions is valid:

1. simply rename variables and function names (naw, didn't think so either,
but was worth a try :)

2. Keep the way the functions are currently structured, but recode each
function from scratch. Flow would stay the same and the SQL tables and
queries would stay the same.

3. Don't even look at what's been done, and start from ground zero, at a
prohibitive cost. 50% of the coding dev has already been charged to the
client to bring the original calendar code to specs. We can't re-charge that
50%. How can I recoup?

I think I'm looking for something between 2 and 3, but would be really happy
if #1 is acceptable :)

The modified calendar is here: http://216.87.29.8/YarraCalendar/default.asp
The original calendar can be seen at http://www.aspmart.com/edate.asp

Thanks for any feedback on this.

Nicole






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