Re: Guide to Writing Orchestral Scores with Lilypond?????

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 01/11/2013 07:52 PM, Urs Liska wrote:
> I think it boils down to:
> - can a GNU project link to (or promote in any other way) non-free 
> documentation?
> - can I license a tutorial as free if it contains copyrighted material
> (considered I got explicit permission to display the example on my web site for
> the tutorial).

Well, here's what _I_ would do in your shoes: license freely all the parts of 
the tutorial that are your copyright, and add a clear exception notice for 
musical examples that are still in copyright.  So basically what you'd be saying 
is, "Feel free to copy and make use of any of this except for the stuff that is 
owned by other people."  I would personally go with a permissive rather than 
copyleft license because that way there's no legal problem in combining the 
freely-licensed material with non-free stuff.

So, that way you have a tutorial that is _almost all_ free with the exceptions 
being short musical extracts used as examples.  You can extend this by including 
plenty of other musical examples that are out of copyright or freely licensed. 
With that kind of policy, it is _probably_ acceptable for this work to be linked 
to by Lilypond, just as the FSF considers Wikipedia acceptable even though it 
does contain some non-free material used in a "fair use" context.

If anyone from GNU did complain, you'd have a clear argument that this was 
almost entirely free documentation and that the few non-free examples included 
were only there in order to support the overall goal of adoption and use of a 
free software package.  And even if the objection was sustained, all that would 
happen is that Lilypond would have to remove its official website link -- your 
work wouldn't cease to be known or useful because of that.