Re: Lilypond \include statements and the GPL

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 03/29/2013 11:26 AM, Janek Warchoł wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 7:26 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 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

... though such licensing would only solve the immediate problem.  It'd be nice
to have a clear understanding of the actual relationship between GPL and
Lilypond (and indeed, GPL and TeX).

> 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.

Point of clarification: this isn't about the "final score" in the sense of the
PDF output.  This is about what are his obligations if he chooses to distribute
the .ly source file of his score.

> BTW, what about snippets from documentation and LSR?

"This document shows a selected set of LilyPond snippets from the LilyPond
Snippet Repository (LSR). It is in the public domain."
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.17/Documentation/snippets/index.html

I remember this well because I remember being asked to dedicate my snippets to
the public domain when submitting them to LSR.  That said, it might be worth
clarifying whether people submitting snippets direct to the Lilypond docs are
formally asked to dedicate them to the public domain.