Philip Hands <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Let's say I write a Qt program (and confirm that it works by linking > it against Qt in the privacy of my own home) and then I include it > (the source code) in a book as a programming example, and I GPL the > whole book. > > Will people be allowed to copy and modify my code under the GPL (say, to > make it work with GTK), and if not why not?
Did you write it by taking someone else's GPLed code and modifying? If not, it doesn't matter -- you're the author and you get to determine the license terms. If you did, you shouldn't publish that book. [But because of the way that the GPL is written, I think it's fair to pass your work off to someone else who would do the GTK work.] There's also the concept of "fair use". Copyright law is mostly aimed at large scale copying. If you just pass copies off to someone specifically to do that GTK work I think you'd be fine. The "publish it in a book mechanism" works against the ITAR, because the ITAR classifies cryptography code as a weapon, and books have completely different kinds of rules. But copyright does apply to books, so there's fundamentally different about the law in this case. -- Raul