Licensing of Doxygen output
Hi debian-legal,
I am trying to figure out the licensing and appropriate notices for
Doxygen output, especially the Doxyfile generated by "doxygen -g".
The relevant files from the Doxygen sources (except src/config.xml) contain
| Copyright (C) 1997-2008 by Dimitri van Heesch.
|
| Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
| documentation under the terms of the GNU General Public License is hereby
| granted. No representations are made about the suitability of this software
| for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
| See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Some also contain a notice about "Documents produced by doxygen",
reproduced below. The same copyright statement and notices appear on
the Doxygen website <http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/>, with the
copyright dates extended to 2009.
Many projects distribute Doxygen-generated documentation ignoring this
copyright, presumably in accordance with the intent expressed in
| Documents produced by doxygen are derivative works derived from the input
| used in their production; they are not affected by this license.
The intent seems to be to deny that the Doxygen authors need to grant
any permission with respect to Doxygen output. This makes perfect
sense, provided doxygen does not copy any of its source to its output.
Unfortunately, the Doxyfile generated by "doxygen -g" consists mostly
of comments, copied from src/config.l and src/config.xml.
If those comments are not stripped out, must such Doxyfiles be
distributed under the GPL? Do similar considerations apply to
Doxygen's HTML and LaTeX output (I hope not)?
Thanks,
Jonathan
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