Re: Potential LSR licensing violations

[Jean Abou Samra]

> Le 20/10/2022 12:59 CEST, Luca Fascione <l.fascione@gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
> 
> Or you remove it, or you reimplement it


Well yes.


> I think having GPL content in the lsr is the least desirable in the long 
> term, because either folks using it won't notice, or they might find 
> themselves unable or unwilling to use GPL as part of their content.


Perhaps.


> I'm not clear what it means to have GPL source in a sheet of which you have 
> the pdf, it would seem to imply you'd have access to the whole Lilypond 
> source for it, maybe, if you asked for it. A publisher might be unwilling to 
> accept such terms, maybe


No; the GPL puts no restrictions on the output of the program,
only on the program itself and modified versions (and compiled
versions of it, but I really don't think compiling to PDF would
count, because the purpose of a PDF is to be viewed, not to be
executed like an executable produced by a C compiler). Cf.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL

LilyPond does embed a tagline, but it's so short you'd have trouble
claiming copyright on its text. The only thing in the output PDF
that could be considered copyrighted from LilyPond is the glyphs
from the Emmentaler font, and this is covered in the LICENSE file:

  * The files under mf/ form a font, and this font is dual-licensed
    under the GPL+Font exception and the SIL Open Font License (OFL).
    A copy of the OFL is in the file LICENSE.OFL.

    The font exception for the GPL stipulates the following exception:

      If you create a document which uses fonts included in LilyPond,
      and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the
      document, then this font does not by itself cause the resulting
      document to be covered by the GNU General Public License.  This
      exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the
      document might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
      If you modify one or more of the fonts, you may extend this
      exception to your version of the fonts but you are not obliged
      to do so.  If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception
      statement from your version.


In other words, everything is done properly so that an output PDF
from LilyPond is not covered by the GPL.

However, if you use the -dembed-source-code option to embed your
source in the PDF, then the source remains under whatever license
you distribute it, independently from the graphical content of the
PDF. If it's adapted from source code found in LilyPond, it must be
GPL.

IANAL (I should have said this on all my previous messages)