Authorship and copyright of derived exporters

Authorship and copyright of derived exporters

[Robert Klein]

Hi,

I've been wondering, whom to put on the copyright line and author: lines
in a derived exporter.

For example, I have an exporter derived from the LaTeX backend which
basically is:

- the (org-export-define-derived-backend ...) call
- a renamed copy of org-latex-template modified by adding
  - five lines of comment
  - five times three lines of code
- a copy of the end-user functions of the LaTeX exporter,
  - the functions renamed for the derived exporter
  - 'latex inside them replaced for the derived exporter
- a couple of comment lines explaining the derived exporter



On the other side, I have another derived exporter (from the HTML
backend, this time) with way more of I've written myself,  but still the
end-user functions of the html backend (-export-as-html,
-convert-regino-to-html, -export-to-html, and -publish-to-html) copied,
renamed and 'html replaced inside those functions.


Should I copy the authors of the backends I derived from into my
file(s)?  I'd rather not leave them out, but, on the other hand, maybe
they don't want to be associated with my sometimes paltry attempts at
coding.

Thank you very much for your advice.

Best regards
Robert

Re: Authorship and copyright of derived exporters

[vilibald]

> Hi,
>
> I've been wondering, whom to put on the copyright line and author: lines
> in a derived exporter.
>
> For example, I have an exporter derived from the LaTeX backend which
> basically is:
>
> - the (org-export-define-derived-backend ...) call
> - a renamed copy of org-latex-template modified by adding
>   - five lines of comment
>   - five times three lines of code
> - a copy of the end-user functions of the LaTeX exporter,
>   - the functions renamed for the derived exporter
>   - 'latex inside them replaced for the derived exporter
> - a couple of comment lines explaining the derived exporter
>
>
>
> On the other side, I have another derived exporter (from the HTML
> backend, this time) with way more of I've written myself,  but still the
> end-user functions of the html backend (-export-as-html,
> -convert-regino-to-html, -export-to-html, and -publish-to-html) copied,
> renamed and 'html replaced inside those functions.
>
>
> Should I copy the authors of the backends I derived from into my
> file(s)?  I'd rather not leave them out, but, on the other hand, maybe
> they don't want to be associated with my sometimes paltry attempts at
> coding.
>
> Thank you very much for your advice.
>
> Best regards
> Robert
>
>

Hi Robert,
I'm actually in similar position, I've created an exporter to dokuwiki and
creole formats, and looking at the contrib/lisp/ox-* files it seems that
nobody is mentioning original backend authors I'd say that if it is new
backend although derived than there's no need to mention them as you are
using it more like library functions

Best regards
Vilibald

Re: Authorship and copyright of derived exporters

[Bastien]

vilibald@wvi.cz writes:

> I'm actually in similar position, I've created an exporter to dokuwiki and
> creole formats,

Interesting -- can you share a pointer to these contributions?

Thanks!

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Authorship and copyright of derived exporters

[vilibald]

> vilibald@wvi.cz writes:
>
>> I'm actually in similar position, I've created an exporter to dokuwiki
>> and
>> creole formats,
>
> Interesting -- can you share a pointer to these contributions?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
>  Bastien
>
>

I've shared it on github, please see https://github.com/w-vi/ox-wk.el ...
My first intention was to support more formats than just creole and
dokuwiki but as in the company I work for the mediawiki is no longer in
use I didn't really got to it, but I'm happy to add support for it as
well.

Vilibald

Re: Authorship and copyright of derived exporters

[Bastien]

vilibald@wvi.cz writes:

> I've shared it on github, please see
> https://github.com/w-vi/ox-wk.el

Great, thanks for sharing!

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Authorship and copyright of derived exporters

[Bastien]

Robert Klein <roklein@roklein.de> writes:

> Should I copy the authors of the backends I derived from into my
> file(s)?  I'd rather not leave them out, but, on the other hand, maybe
> they don't want to be associated with my sometimes paltry attempts at
> coding.

A derived backend only works when the upstream one is available, so
I'd say no, there is no need to mention authors of the upstream one.
`org-export-define-derived-backend' is just a function generating
code from other pieces of code.

-- 
 Bastien