> On 30 Oct 2019, at 18:48, Carl Sorensen <c_soren...@byu.edu> wrote: > >> In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any >> say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. >> If the user uses your program to enter or convert her own data, the >> copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More generally, when a >> program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of >> the output inherits that of the input it was generated from. >> >> So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial >> parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program. For >> instance, part of the output of Bison (see above) would be covered by the >> GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in this specific case. >> >> You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its output even >> if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that copied text serves no >> practical purpose, the user could simply delete that text from the output >> and use only the rest. Then he would not have to obey the conditions on >> redistribution of the copied text. > > This says to me that you can consider LSR snippets as part of the code used > to create music (any music, not just your specific music). You can then put > your specific music in a separate file, with separate copyright. And the > modified LilyPond (including the LSR snippets) is a derivative work of > LilyPond, and has GPL rights, and you would be required to share all of that > code. But the created music engraving (pdf, svg, or midi) is not a > derivative work of LilyPond, but an output of the program lilypond, and > cannot be restricted by the GPL, according to the FSF.
The snippets should be LGPL for being includable under other licenses, I believe, because the processed part remains in the output, and thus copyrightable. Thus, they play the same role as the Bison skeleton file and GCC libraries.