GPL License (was: Diverses editions questions)

[Bob Schmertz]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:

>address@hidden writes:
>> >    mercial  distribution. What I mean is, can something that
>> >    has  been  typesetted  with  Lilypond  and layed out with
>> >    LaTeX be elligible for selling?
>> 
>> I'm not a specialist on the Gnu licences, but as far as
>> I can understand, there's nothing that prevents you from 
>> using Lilypond for commercial typesetting.
>
>everyone has my full permission to sell lily output for whatever
>people want to pay.

In fact, if you were to say otherwise, that might be in violation of the
GPL.  The GNU GPL places restrictions on distribution of the program and
its source code, but these restrictions usually do not apply to the output
of the program.  One of the freedoms guaranteed by the license is that you
can use the program for whatever purpose you like, including making money,
as long as you follow the rules regarding modification and re-distribution
of the program.

One interesting exception was with the Bison parser generator.  The output
of a Bison program allegedly does contain actual parts of the source
code of Bison.  It was initially judged that Bison could not be used to
make proprietary software, because that software would contain some of the
GPL'ed source code of Bison.  The makers of Bison, however, decided to
make an explicit exception for this, allowing the output of Bison to be
used in any way, including in proprietary software.

There's plenty of commercial software for Unix, sold in binary form only,
that has been compiled with gcc.  This is OK, because these binaries are
the output of gcc, not gcc itself.

-- 
HTH,
Bob Schmertz
Yahoo Messenger ID: rschmertz