Re-implementing an Open Source project in another language
bdfh42: This one is pretty simple. If you were to write a clone of (say) PhpBB without looking at the original source code but just re-engineering the functionality you wanted to replicate then you would have a new piece of software over which you could claim copyright and which you could license as you wish. This is just the same as sitting down to write (for example) a new word processing program that emulated key features of MS Word.However, porting an existing GPL code base to a new language would I strongly suspect be seen as a simple "fork" of the original code and you would (quite rightly) have to release your new code under the GPL license. This is fair and just - you can't just rip off other peoples intellectual property no matter how much work there is involved in doing so.