Question about documentation and patents

[David Woolley]

Grayg Ralphsnyder wrote:

> I think that documentation would be covered by copyright and not 
> license.  A listing of the actual source code would be covered by the 

I'm not sure you understand what a licence is; a licence is permission 
to do something that would otherwise be illegal.  Pure software 
licences, at least as understood by the open source community, in a 
common law environment, are permissions to do things with the software 
that would otherwise be illegal under copyright law, which in the UK, I 
believe, even includes running it.  Open source software licences only 
have meaning because the code is copyright.

If you supply documentation with open source code, it would be very 
strange not to let at least the key documentation be copied and included 
with the redistributed code.  However, if you relied purely on copyright 
and didn't give a licence to copy the documentation, that would be the 
result; something the FSF certainly wouldn't approve of, even if it is 
not required for the OSD.  (In the real world, it may well  be the case 
that the software is impractical to use unless you've previously read 
the O'Reilly book, but it will generally still include a README and an 
INTALLATION file, as documentation.)

Note that most commercial "licence agreements" intend to be contracts, 
and, although they give permissions to do what would otherwise be 
illegal, they typically also remove rights that one would have under 
copyright law.

IANAL so TINLA.

-- 
David Woolley
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