Re: Org-mode exporters licensing

[Daniele Nicolodi <daniele@grinta.net>]

On 27/07/15 13:52, Marcin Borkowski wrote:
> I disagree.  Licensing a tutorial with GPL is a stupid thing to do.
> A tutorial may contain code which people naturally mimic (or even
> copy).  Such things should definitely be in PD.

As yourself pointed out in one of your emails, in many legal
ordinations, there is no such concept as public domain: you cannot
renounce to the copyright on your intellectual production.

Therefore licensing something as public domain is not quite possible. If
you want to grant the users of your code the most freedom (but do not
care about this freedom being carried over to others) the 3-Clause BSD
license http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause, the 2-Clause BSD
license http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause, or the MIT license
http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html are good candidate
licenses formulated in the framework of copyright law as accepted
internationally.

However, you cannot derive your work from some other work distributed
under GPL and license it with a more permissive license (as the ones
suggested above). What constituted a derived work is however not
scientifically defined (and you have been rather terse in describing how
your work build upon code released under the GPLv3). In one place you
explicitly mention running a query-replace on the source code:
mechanical transformations of the source code are considered derived
works, even if the end result does not resemble at all the original.

I would suggest you to do derive your work from the GPL code and then
consult with the authors about its licensing. If you are only using the
GPL code as a skeleton, I think they would not have objections (but you
could also easily re-implement it from scratch).

Other than this I would recommend you to refrain from harsh comments on
a matter on which you hold strong ideas but weak knowledge (as most of
this thread demonstrates). Especially if your positions seem detrimental
of the Copyleft model, and you are asking for help in a mailing-list
devoted to a very successful Copyleft program.

Cheers,
Daniele