Hi all, after a short discussion in a recent thread, I have a serious technical question.
Assume that (for some reason) I want to write an Org-mode exporter which won't be GPL'd. (Use-case: having written a few custom exporters, I'm writing a tutorial on them, and I consider publishing a *tutorial* with GPL'd code a Bad Thing™. (The idea of a programming tutorial is that other people can or even should reuse the code in the tutorial, right? And I see no reason to impose GPL on them.)) How do I do that? Is that even possible? Also, is it possible to get an actual answer to this question without spending money on lawyers? The manual says: ,---- | Your two entry points are respectively ‘org-export-define-backend’ and | ‘org-export-define-derived-backend’. To grok these functions, you | should first have a look at ‘ox-latex.el’ (for how to define a new | back-end from scratch) and ‘ox-beamer.el’ (for how to derive a new | back-end from an existing one. `---- So basically you are expected to use existing GPL'd code to learn to write new exporters. Also, the overall structure of the exporters is extremally similar. For instance, the :menu-entry argument of org-export-define-backend is almost the same for all exporters (and it should be, in order not to break usability!). Should I follow such conventions, in order to satisfy users, or should I deliberately break it, in order to satisfy lawyers? Also, the names of functions (like `org-latex-export-as-latex' vs `org-latex-export-to-latex') are similar across exporters. Should I use this convention, too, in order to satisfy fellow programmers, or should I deliberately break it, in order to satisfy lawyers? Also, the docstrings of many transcoders are similar. How am I supposed to write a docstring which is at the same time more or less comprehensive and different enough from the existing ones, so that I don't end up in jail? (<--- this is actually a joke. I hope so at least...) And so on. Please refrain from comments about my stupidity or stupidity of the so-called IP law. And please understand that if I'm sounding a bit angry in this email, it's because I'm *very* angry about this whole lawyer mafia restricting my freedom (again). (Note: I'm all for restricting people's freedom when there are important reasons for that. I just consider this situation not to be one of these.) Best, -- Marcin Borkowski http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science Adam Mickiewicz University
