On Sat, Sep 15, 2007 at 11:52:13AM -0400, (Jari Aalto) via RT wrote: > The application's distribution archive includes structure: > > doc/txt/program.txt > doc/html/program.html > doc/man/program.1 > > to where the Makefile can extract the POD section's content using > various Perl language filters: man, text, html respectively. > > The Savannah admin has asked to license these generated output files > under GFDL.
Hi, Actually we need the _source form_ of the documentation - that is, the POD - to be licensed under the GFDL (or optionaly dual-licensed GPL/GFDL). Generated documentation will be under the same (dual)license, as it's a derived work of the source form. More generally: > 1. What is the effect of the extracting process that uses Perl's own > commands to generate the content in license wise? Does it affect > the final output's licensing conditions? In this case the generated output is a derived work of the input - input's license applies. > 2. Can the extracted content be put under Dual GPL/GFDL licence or > does it share the cracteristics of the source where it came from? The input's license still applies, so the output's license needs to be compatible with the input's. I think there are a few particular cases where you can consider the output as an entire new work. This was used to generate the first free windows.h (ancestry of mingw) using a free source code that included <windows.h> and displayed the values of some specific variables; this free source code could be compiled to produce a program that could produce a .h with the same values. But as you can see this is really a corner case and this uses a small subset of the input under conditions that are compatible with the input's. In your case the generated documentation is clearly a derived work of the source form. -- Sylvain
