Re: LilyPond, LilyPond snippets and the GPL

[karl]

Urs:
...
> One of the main issues we have at play here (and that has been discussed 
> by others in this thread) is that tools like LilyPond and LaTeX blur the 
> lines between source, program, and document.
> 
> The arguments that are expressed *for* a requirement to license the PDF 
> (etc.) files resulting from a LilyPond or LaTeX run are all based on the 
> assumption that the graphical documents created like this are 
> "comparable to the binary resulting from a compilation using a "typical" 
> C compiler." I think (which others have stated earlier today) that the 
> culprit here is that these arguments (e.g. when pointing to resources 
> like https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifiedJustBinary) 
> assume that a "resulting PDF document" can be considered equivalent to a 
> "resulting program" or "resulting software". It has been said several 
> times: the PDF/PNG/SVG resulting from a LilyPond run is a document, not 
> a program.
...

Just to provide a data point...

As I work with postscript files, the result is certaintly a program.
Also files (at least one) from the lilypond distribution are included
verbatim in the output (I.ps is just one file created using lilypond).

//////////////////
$ fgrep -a -A10 'procset (music-drawing-routines.ps)' I.ps
%%BeginResource: procset (music-drawing-routines.ps) 1 0
%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%
% Functions for direct and embedded PostScript

% Careful with double % as comment prefix.
% Any %%X comment is interpreted as DSC comments.

% TODO: use dicts or prefixes to prevent namespace pollution.

/pdfmark where
//////////////////
$ head -10 /Net/git/lilypond/ps/music-drawing-routines.ps 
%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%
% Functions for direct and embedded PostScript

% Careful with double % as comment prefix.
% Any %%X comment is interpreted as DSC comments.

% TODO: use dicts or prefixes to prevent namespace pollution.

/pdfmark where
//////////////////

Regards,
/Karl Hammar