On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 01:16:08PM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:
Ross Paterson wrote:
According to fptools/libraries/GLUT/Graphics/UI/GLUT.hs, the documentation of the GLUT package is derived from a document with the notice
Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 by Mark J. Kilgard, Silicon Graphics, Inc. No part of this documentation may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the original author.
Do you have this permission, and if so what are its limits?
No, I haven't been able yet to contact Mark Kilgard in any way. I've tried several times, but never received an answer, neither positive nor negative. I've sent mails directly to Mark's current company, NVIDIA, and tried to contact him via 'Mr. OpenGL' himself, John Leech at SGI, without avail.
Other projects (Mesa, several other OpenGL bindings, ...) simply use the documentation rather unchanged, but obviously don't care about legal issues. The HOpenGL-GLUT docs are *not* simply a cut-n-paste job, the API is quite different from the C API, so I finally got a bit fed up with this legal issue... >:-(
I don't see this as a legal issue -- his wishes are dreadfully clear, unless we hear to the contrary. It is very inconvenient, but that's not the same thing.
I'm a little bit clueless about how to proceed. Perhaps I should nuke the above passage from the documentation and replace it with credits to Mark.
I'm afraid that nothing but removing all of Mark Kilgard's words would respect his wishes. I know that's terrible, but I see no alternative.