Re: Lilypond \include statements and the GPL

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 7:26 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Personally I feel it would be nice to resolve any potential ambiguity.
>
> Obviously the best way to do this is just to show that I'm definitively wrong 
> in
> my interpretation (this would be nice:-),

I'd say this: without the actual content of the included file
available, \include statement doesn't do anything.  If your .ly file
uses a function defined in an \included library file, but you don't
provide this file, the function cannot be used.

> but aside from that I think there are
> probably several other ways in which it could be done, including ensuring that
> all files intended to be \include'd are licensed under something more 
> permissive
> (LGPL, BSD, Boost, Apache, ...), or adding a simple exception or clarification
> to Lilypond's license akin to the GPL font exception.

+1

An example came to my mind: imagine someone typesetting a score and
using one (just one) function from OLLib.  Distributing whole OLLib
together with the score just to have this one functionality would be
inconvenient, so he'd like to actually paste this function from OLLib
into his file.  Can he do this?  I think that such usage should be
permitted (and not resulting in the final score being copylefted), as
long as the function is clearly marked and attributed.

BTW, what about snippets from documentation and LSR?  AFAIK whole lily
documentation is under GNU Free Documentation License; if someone
takes a template from the docs and uses it as a basis for his score,
what should happen then?  Clearly the score would be a derivative work
in some way, but i don't think it's our goal to force all such scores
to be copylefted...

This really needs clarification!

best,
Janek