Re: old and new GNU documentation licenses, and the some of the manuals to which they apply
Claus Färber <claus@xn--frber-gra.muc.de> wrote:
> Branden Robinson schrieb/wrote:
> > Yes, though it should be kept in mind that the GPL-incompatibility
> > problem remains. We *still* won't be able to drop hunks of these
> > manuals into their corresponding programs as on-line documentation,
> > unless the same text happens to already exist somewhere else under the
> > GNU GPL.
>
> So info can't display non-GPL documentation either?
>
> Sorry, but that's plain wrong. For a GPL program including an online
> help viewer or calling an external help viewer, the online help is just
> "data" that does not have to match the licence of the program.
That is _not_ what he meant. He meant cut/paste docs from the manual
into the software to have it displayed either as a tooltip or
otherwise. The documentation needs to become an intrinsic part of the
code to do that.
As for `So info can't display non-GPL documentation either?', well
sometimes I wonder about that too. The info file provides computed
information to let reader program know where the information resides,
and what information resides there, much like a library. The reader
hooks into those. How different this is from using a library (for some
random purpose) whose license is incompatible, I'm not sure.
Peter
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