Re: Should our documentation be free?
Adam Warner wrote:
>PPS: Does anyone know of GFDL-licensed documentation that contains
>significant verbatim quotations of GPLed code?
Yes. The libstdc++ manual is largely generated from Doxygen comments
in GPL'ed files. (But there are some skeleton files which are straight
GFDL, so it can't be purely GPLed.)
I have raised the licensing issue with the GCC mailing list
gcc@gcc.gnu.org.
>As an idea this GPL code has been taken from Emacs:
>http://www.gnu.org/manual/elisp-manual-21-2.8/html_node/elisp_350.html
>About 140 lines of code have been copied from a 207 line file. We know
>the licences are incompatible. Is this OK without the Free Software
>Foundation explicitly dual licensing the code? (I'd say yes this is OK
>because all the code is assigned to them so they can do what they like,
>while still maintaining that we can't do the same).
Right. The FSF can distribute this code; it's dual-licensed
simply because they, the copyright holder distributed it under both
licenses. :-) If anyone else changed the GPLed or GFDLed copy and
didn't explicitly dual-license, nobody could port those changes to the
other copy (except the copyright holder).
Nobody but the FSF can legally distribute a revised or
amended version of the libstdc++ manual regenerated from source,
because the regeneration process involves taking text from files
licensed under the GPL and putting it in a document licensed under the
GFDL.
(If the skeleton files were replaced with GPLed skeleton files, then a
GPLed manual could be created.)
>This at least demonstrates that the situation is unworkable without
>being in the privileged position of owning all copyrights.
Yep.
--
Nathanael Nerode <neroden at gcc.gnu.org>
http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
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