Re: KDE gone, Lyx next ?

[Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com>]

Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
>   Let's say I write a Qt program (and confirm that it works by linking
>   it against Qt in the privacy of my own home) and then I include it
>   (the source code) in a book as a programming example, and I GPL the
>   whole book.
>
>   Will people be allowed to copy and modify my code under the GPL (say, to
>   make it work with GTK), and if not why not?

Did you write it by taking someone else's GPLed code and modifying?

If not, it doesn't matter -- you're the author and you get to determine
the license terms.

If you did, you shouldn't publish that book.  [But because of the way
that the GPL is written, I think it's fair to pass your work off to
someone else who would do the GTK work.]

There's also the concept of "fair use".  Copyright law is mostly aimed at
large scale copying.  If you just pass copies off to someone specifically
to do that GTK work I think you'd be fine.

The "publish it in a book mechanism" works against the ITAR, because the
ITAR classifies cryptography code as a weapon, and books have completely
different kinds of rules.  But copyright does apply to books, so there's
fundamentally different about the law in this case.

-- 
Raul