Copyright

I have a question /anus/, i found a program that's licensed via GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 and I've then gone out and wrote my own server of said program. I model my setup similar to it, but i use different manors to do things most of the time, but there's the occasional function or two that i copy/pasted straight from their source with maybe a edit or two.

I want to open my source up to the public, but i have not a clue what to do in terms of licensing or if those small copy/pasted (with some edits) will invalidate my license and require me to use their license/copyright

tl;dr i want to make sure the original author can't come and take all the rights for my program

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Rewrite the small section of copied code. It's not hard.

>>2
so if i rewrite in a different style or use of variables,etc then it's no longer theirs?

One of the things i did compared to their program was cut out this memory hog of a Vector class so that changed a lot of the copied stuff already.

but i use different manors

>>3
You need to set down the requirements and rewrite all copied code from scratch. Preferably use different approaches where possible so you won't inadvertently copy from memory. Just changing a variable name here and there won't do.
It won't be a clean-room implementation, but that doesn't matter unless you expect a court case. If you just want to have clean hands and not get smelly hippies on your case it's a matter of ``bad faith'' or ``good faith'' efforts.

I'm drunk so I'm going to be less (!) of an ass than usual.

People tend to do "clean room" versions in this situation. A classic technique is to describe the functionality to someone who has never seen the code in question, and have them re-implement it. If you're a lone developer, that probably won't do for you. My best advice in that case is to note the interface it provides and rewrite it from scratch without referring to the original code. After that you can go over the code and compare it to the original to make sure it's not too similar. tl;dr >>3-san has the right idea.

>>5,6
It all comes down to whether the compiled output will be different or not.

GNU shit tends to be bloated, optimize it.

>>7
Back to Anonix, please !

Ooops, I meant >>5-san

>>7
He wants to release the source. You can't really optimize that. Or can you‽

>>8
Just ignore such remarks. Bloat is often used to mean "has features that I do not use". You need to consider the context by which the feature exists, GNU is a general purpose system and if only one person uses the feature (and presuming the feature is reasonable in scope), that feature is not bloat.