Free documentation licenses

[Tom Hull]

John Cowan wrote:
> 
> 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 agree, but it's kind of a moot point, given that the book is itself GPL.
This is not because it quotes GPL code. It's because some of the documents
included were already GPL, and the exception was licensed under terms that
could be relicensed as GPL.

> I think if Maxwell's commentary
> were inline, there wouldn't be any question that the result was a
> derivative work.

I'm not so sure. I could see it as fair use, especially given that the
commentary does not monetarily undermine the copyright holder, and that it
does not subvert the GPL on the code.

But I'm hard pressed to think of a good test case. I think that maintainable
commentary should be somehow wed to the source code, and as such should
follow the source code's license. I could imagine someone writing a book
as sort of an introductory programming tutorial, which would take one or
more GPL programs in toto and interleave detailed commentary, but in such
a case I'm sure any conventional publisher would seek permission first.

-- 
/*
 *  Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.ocston.org/~thull/
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