Re: Selling music engraved by Lilypond

[Joseph Wakeling]

Frédéric Chiasson wrote:
> I just saw a message about the tagline "Engraved by Lilypond" and I was
> wondering if it is legal to sell our own partitions of our own
> compositions engraved with Lilypond? Is there any limitation you put
> against a «commercial» use (for now, it is really «on the side» but
> still...)?

Lilypond is distributed under the GNU General Public License.  Under
these terms there is *no way* to restrict you in this manner.

"The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from
the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on
the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
Whether that is true depends on what the Program does."
   -- from section 0 of the GPL.

"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise
of the rights granted herein."
   -- from section 6.

The wider philosophical scope for this can be seen in the Free Software
definition at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.  "Freedom 0"
is "The freedom to run the program, for any purpose."

You are not even obliged to keep the "Engraved by Lilypond" tag line,
although obviously it is nice and polite to do so. :-)

    -- Joe