On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 01:28:39AM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 21:25, Glenn Maynard wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 08:24:46PM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > > > I've a number of documents that say "References to "object code" and > > > "executables" in the GNU GPL are to be interpreted as the output of any > > > document formatting or typesetting system, including intermediate and > > > printed output." Some of them I've written, but I borrowed the wording > > > from something else (I suspect in Debian), and I've encouraged people to > > > use this phrasing many times since. > > > > What if I take a man page, output it as plain text, and use that as source, > > modifying it, maintaining it, etc. and discarding the original manpage? The > > GPL lets me do that; this "interpretation" does not.
> Okay. I think you are alone in this opinion, but that's just based on > the fact no one's ever expressed a problem with this before. I haven't > thought much about such a case, but my (tentative) position is that such > a use would not be allowed by the GPL even without this statement. In > particular the GPL talks about needing to do things to "files", and the > need for the source to be "machine-readable". Your source-on-paper, even > if it is the preferred form of modification, is neither a file nor > machine readable, so you can't meet the terms of the GPL anyway. "Plain text" meant "manpage.txt", a file output from the document formatting system nroff[1], and then edited to create "API Documentation.txt". If I was forking documentation, and it was written as a manpage, that's probably the first thing I'd do: convert it into a format that won't give me a tumor. That output becomes my new source. I believe the GPL clearly allows this. The text file is my preferred form for modification. [1] or groff or cough or whatever, I can never keep them straight -- Glenn Maynard
