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Re: GPL as a license for documentation: What about derived works?



MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com> schrieb:

> =?iso-8859-1?q?Frank_K=FCster?= <frank@debian.org> wrote:
>> please point me to an older thread if this has been discussed before, I
>> didn't find it in the archives.
>
> Did you check http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html first?

I didn't find it helpful in this case.

>> 1. The first is whether there are any established criteria by which the
>>    creation of a derived work can be distinguished from mere aggregation.
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation is a starting
> point, if you translate it to documents. I think it depends whether the
> first work could be replaced with an equivalent without requiring changes
> to the later one.

Oh, thanks. This is a criterion that can be well used for documentation
(as opposed to the software-centric 

,----
| depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc,
| function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics
| of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).
`----

> AIUI, the GPL can't override copyright law and it only grants extra
> permissions. It doesn't take any away. A text published with no
> licence defaults to "all rights reserved" usually.

Thanks, that also made things clearer to me. It sounds so obvious once
someone said it...

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer



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