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:
> Peter S Galbraith schrieb/wrote:
> > Claus Färber <claus@xn--frber-gra.muc.de> wrote:
> >> 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.
>
> It can be a seperate XML (or whatever) file that's only read by the
> software.
But that's not what he meant! Please don't change what he said to fit
your view.
That would be a major inconvenience to do in elisp instead of
simply insert the text in the code.
> > 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 same is basically true for HTML and XML documents. Can you have a
> free web browser display non-free web pages? Should Galeon (or Konqueror
> or ...) refuse to display the FSF's homepage because it is not GPL'd?
Difference between a code interpreter and a library. You have to
consider the Info reader as an interpreter to get away with this.
I suppose that's a correct analogy, so you can read non-free docs
in Info.
Peter
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