Re: Scope of Lout's license

[Joe Beach]

Hello, 

I've never looked, but I'll take your word about Lout source postscript
being in the postscript files Lout later produces from a user's markup.
However, when the postscript is printed, the only thing that shows up is
the content the user put in his or her markup file. The Lout source
postscript is used by the printer and then discarded, it never makes it
to the printed page. A publisher only needs to be concerned with the
copyright of the material they actually publish, and in this case they
never publish the Lout source. 

I don't think a publisher should be the least bit concerned about
copyright infringment due to Lout source being in the postscript file.
If they are, they should also be concerned about copyright infringement
occuring every time they use any printer driver. For example, if the
driver source for an HP Deskjet printer is copyrighted and portions of
that source are sent verbatim to the printer as commands, it is
essentially the same situation that you are describing with Lout. In
fact, if the print job is printed to file before it is sent to the
printer, it is exactly the same situation. Again, there is no copyright
infringement issue because the printer commands are never printed on the
paper, they are only used to aid in printing the content created by the
user. 


Joe Beach

On Mon, 2004-06-28 at 03:38, David Kuehling wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm considering using Lout for a project which might in the end produce
> a commercially printed book, and would like to ask about possible
> problems with the GPL-licensing.
> 
> As parts of the Lout source code contain PostScript which is embedded
> into files created by Lout, couldn't it be argued, that those output
> files are then derived works of Lout and fall under the GPL?
> 
> Lout is not the only free software project with that kind of problem.
> The GNU C compiler usually links compiled programs against certain
> startup files (libgcc).  However, it contains an explicit disclaimer to
> prevent the GPL from taking effect:
> 
>     In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License,
>     the Free Software Foundation gives you unlimited permission to link
>     the compiled version of this file into combinations with other
>     programs, and to distribute those combinations without any
>     restriction coming from the use of this file. [..]
> 
> Such a disclaimer seems to be missing in Lout, which presents some kind
> of uncertainty.  Could a publisher refrain from printing a book which
> seems to have that kind of unclear copyright status?
> 
> regards,
> 
> David