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Re: Suggestion to maintainers of GFDL docs



On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 04:16:57AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 02:34:36PM +0000, Brian M. Carlson wrote:
> > Debian can't legally distribute such an info document. Because the
> > GFDL is incompatible with the GPL, it is prohibited to even
> > create an info document from GFDL'd texinfo source. See #183860.
> 
> Hrm, if that's the case, we can't distribute, eg, the pcl-cvs.texi
> file either -- after all, it's licensed under a "verbatim copying only"
> license, but has the "\input texinfo" line at the top.
> 
> I don't think that is the case though, for two reasons:
> 
> 	(1) we don't actually distribute pcl-cvs anything that's made use
> 	    of the TeX stuff; so we haven't made copies of texinfo.tex,
> 	    and don't need to be concerned with its copyright
> 
> 	(2) the TeX output probably comes under the exemption in section 0
> 	    of the GPL -- `...the output from the Program (texinfo.tex)
> 	    is covered only if its contents constitute a work based
> 	    on the Program (independent of having been made by running
> 	    the Program).'

	In this case, texinfo.tex is akin to a header file that a
program.  The program would be TeX (or a variant that implements the TeX
macro language.)

	However, this only applies to DVI and PDF forms of this work.
The info documentation is generated by makeinfo, which does not put any
significant chunks of itself within the output.

Simon



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