Free documentation licenses

[John Cowan]

Tom Hull wrote:

> Scott Maxwell's "Linux Core Kernel Commentary" seems to argue otherwise.
> This book (published by Coriolis) contains a very large extract of the
> Linux source code (license GPL), followed by a short commentary (copyright,
> all rights reserved). I don't know what Coriolis's thinking was, but I can
> imagine two plausible justifications:
> 
>  1) The book itself is an aggregation.

I think that's correct.  So the commentary is copyright, and there is a
(not very useful) compilation copyright on the book.

> Maxwell's quotation is 39338 lines of code.

I was actually thinking of _Linux Programming White Papers_, which clearly
makes fair use of the kernel source.  I think if Maxwell's commentary
were inline, there wouldn't be any question that the result was a
derivative work.

-- 
There is / one art                   || John Cowan <jcowan at reutershealth.com>
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to do / all things                   || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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