On 2015-07-27, at 14:17, Daniele Nicolodi <dani...@grinta.net> wrote:
> On 27/07/15 13:52, Marcin Borkowski wrote: >> I disagree. Licensing a tutorial with GPL is a stupid thing to do. >> A tutorial may contain code which people naturally mimic (or even >> copy). Such things should definitely be in PD. > > As yourself pointed out in one of your emails, in many legal > ordinations, there is no such concept as public domain: you cannot > renounce to the copyright on your intellectual production. That I've already learned. OTOH, one of the reasons to use PD might be that I explicitly state that I object the legal system I live in. (Mind you: I'm not an anarchist, and I'm very far from that. But this system is almost unbearable.) > Therefore licensing something as public domain is not quite possible. If > you want to grant the users of your code the most freedom (but do not > care about this freedom being carried over to others) the 3-Clause BSD > license http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause, the 2-Clause BSD > license http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause, or the MIT license > http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html are good candidate > licenses formulated in the framework of copyright law as accepted > internationally. Thanks for the suggestions! > However, you cannot derive your work from some other work distributed > under GPL and license it with a more permissive license (as the ones > suggested above). What constituted a derived work is however not > scientifically defined (and you have been rather terse in describing how > your work build upon code released under the GPLv3). In one place you > explicitly mention running a query-replace on the source code: > mechanical transformations of the source code are considered derived > works, even if the end result does not resemble at all the original. I agree that I was probably too concise. In another post I included an explicit example of what kind of "transformations" (mechanical or otherwise) I had in mind. I still personally find hard to believe that what I have in mind would consitute "derived work". > I would suggest you to do derive your work from the GPL code and then > consult with the authors about its licensing. If you are only using the > GPL code as a skeleton, I think they would not have objections (but you > could also easily re-implement it from scratch). This seems wise. I'm not sure whether I would re-implement it "easily", especially that I see no point in deliberately not looking at existing code. (Besides, I saw it anyway, and I can't unsee it;-).) > Other than this I would recommend you to refrain from harsh comments on > a matter on which you hold strong ideas but weak knowledge (as most of > this thread demonstrates). Especially if your positions seem detrimental > of the Copyleft model, and you are asking for help in a mailing-list > devoted to a very successful Copyleft program. Well, as I mentioned earlier, my knowledge is less and less weak, also thanks to your explanations. OTOH, the more I know about these issues, the more I dislike the status quo, and the more harsh my opinions about GPL in particular are. (It is not a secret that I am very critical of the GPL and of the FSF. Still, as I said before, I'm very hesitant about explicitly breaking their rules.) > Cheers, > Daniele Thanks again, -- Marcin Borkowski http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science Adam Mickiewicz University
