On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 04:44:16PM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Ross J. Reedstrom writes:
>
> > Actually, that's a good question. We've had the regular go-arounds on
> > HACKERs regarding code licensing (short answer: it'll stay BSD for the
> > forseeable future), but never discussed documentation licenses.
>
> This is easy:
>
> Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
> documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this
> paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.
Ah, good. Settled then.
>
> > The 'source code' for a doc is easily recoverable from the distributed
> > 'compiled' version, unlike the case for software.
>
> Have you ever looked at a PS or PDF file lately? ;-)
Actually, yes. Have you seen what pstoedit is capable of? I'm often astounded
how good it's output is.
As a test, I just ran the latest PDF I've got, which came from a journal
article. Used xpdf to create a postscript file, and pstoedit to make
a fig file from that. Granted, it's still a drawing format, but automated
extraction from the well documented fig format would be rather simple.
All of this is beside the point, in any case. What I meant was not
that the "source" was _automatically_ recoverable, but easily, in the
technical sense:
I can pay a typist (perhaps in a developing world document bodyshop:
such exist) to generate source code for me, since I've got the license to
copy, modify, and distribute it, regardless if it's FDL or BSD licensed.
If it's FDL, I don't have to pay the typist. But I can't add my own
chapter and not allow it to be copied, either.
But it's settled. BSD doco it is.
Ross
