Best practices for including open source code from other public projects?

Posted by Bryan Kemp on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Bryan Kemp
Published on 2012-06-28T02:43:06Z Indexed on 2012/06/28 3:24 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 247

If I use an existing open source project that is hosted for example on github within one of my projects, should I check in the code from the other project into my public repo or not? I have mixed feelings about this, #1 I want to give proper credit and attribution to the original developer, and if appropriate I will contribute back any changes I need to make. However given that I have developed / tested against a specific revision of the other projects code, that is the version that I want to distribute to users of my project.

Here is the specific use case to illustrate my point. I am looking for a more generalized answer than this specific case. I am developing simple framework using rabbitmq and python for outbound messages that will allow for sending sms, twitter, email, and is extensible to support additional messaging buses as well. There is a project on github that will make the creation and sending of SMS messages developed by another person. When I create my own repo how do I account for the code that I am including from the other project?

© Programmers or respective owner

Related posts about open-source

Related posts about version-control