Well, I've already responded to this allegation yesterday, but obviously not to this list. Mailing in hurry is seldom a good idea... So I'm trying to explain this once again: Let's start with non-legal (i.e. common sense) arguments: * I do not claim that the documentation of my GLUT binding is written from scratch and therefore I have included a reference to Mark's original work at a prominent place. Although I do not concur with Mark's attitude in all areas, I respect his work: Writing a simple but very useful library which is still in use after a decade is more than most people will probably achieve in their lifetime. * I've tried very hard to stay in GLUT's spirit and made no gratuitous additions, which is exactly what Mark is trying to achieve with the status GLUT. Although sometimes a nuisance, this is why GLUT hasn't evolved into yet another swiss army knife library, which are so common these days. * I do not earn a single cent from my binding, neither does Mark get any money for GLUT. And even if he did, making GLUT available to a broader audience would boost his income, not lessen it. * I've tried to contact Mark several times through different channels, but without avail. Browsing through the links Claus has kindly tracked down, it is clear that Mark has lost his interest in GLUT and probably has a mail filter deleting everything about this topic. On the one hand, I can understand this, because given GLUT's widespread use, he is probably flooded with mails about it. But on the other hand this makes it nearly impossible to really sort this simple copyright issue out, which is a pity. Now to the more formal arguments: Attaching a two-line copyright statement to something isn't even remotely enough to prevent any usage without explicit admission, so I suggest people should read a bit before starting a copyright infringement jihad against me, e.g. http://www.benedict.com/info/fairUse/fairUse.asp or the memorandum of a well-known person in her more peaceful days: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/rice.html And some final words taken from http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm : "[...] The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. [...] To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work." Cheers, S.
On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 09:25:00AM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:
* I do not claim that the documentation of my GLUT binding is written from scratch and therefore I have included a reference to Mark's original work at a prominent place.
That is a delicate way of putting it. It appears that you've used almost all of his text. Even though no money is involved, calling this fair use and ignoring his notice is quite a stretch.
Ross Paterson wrote:
That is a delicate way of putting it. It appears that you've used almost all of his text.
... as a basis. And that's exactly what should be expected for a library binding: Either you follow the initial specs exactly or you don't really do a binding.
Even though no money is involved, calling this fair use and ignoring his notice is quite a stretch.
Well, the amount of work used is of course an issue, but not *the* issue, see e.g.: http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/copypol2.htm#test I use Mark's published (see 2.) work in a non-profit way (1.), but not to a small amount (3.). But there is no market for the GLUT docs and I neither compete with Mark's work nor do I take away royalties from him (4.). So this *is* a fair use IMO, but IANAL... And to restate: I do not "simply ignore" Mark's notice, he ignores any attempt of communication on this issue. Cheers, S.
On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 04:52:29PM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:
Ross Paterson wrote:
That is a delicate way of putting it. It appears that you've used almost all of his text.
... as a basis. And that's exactly what should be expected for a library binding: Either you follow the initial specs exactly or you don't really do a binding.
It would still be a binding without his text -- though not as convenient because people would have to use both his document and a description of how the Haskell binding related to it.
Even though no money is involved, calling this fair use and ignoring his notice is quite a stretch.
Well, the amount of work used is of course an issue, but not *the* issue, see e.g.:
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/copypol2.htm#test
I use Mark's published (see 2.) work in a non-profit way (1.), but not to a small amount (3.). But there is no market for the GLUT docs and I neither compete with Mark's work nor do I take away royalties from him (4.). So this *is* a fair use IMO, but IANAL...
So you're claiming that any non-profit use of a non-profit publication is fair use, any thus any restrictions imposed by the author are void (except for giving them credit, I guess). I'm pretty sure that's incorrect (apart from the importance of the scale of use, you're also forgetting that fair use is limited to certain kinds of purpose), but then we're not lawyers, and you're talking about US copyright law to boot. I just believe that if an author gives us something, s/he should have some control over how their work is used. I'd prefer to receive it with fewer conditions, but that is their decision. It's a fair bargain. A world run your way would be the poorer, with authors less likely to produce non-profit publications.
And to restate: I do not "simply ignore" Mark's notice, he ignores any attempt of communication on this issue.
I did not say "simply ignore" -- I said "ignore", which was true. But his lack of cooperation does not affect anything.
Ross Paterson
I just believe that if an author gives us something, s/he should have some control over how their work is used. I'd prefer to receive it with fewer conditions, but that is their decision. It's a fair bargain. A world run your way would be the poorer, with authors less likely to produce non-profit publications.
I think this argument is at least as important as the legal arguments. If someone abuses or misuses a gift, the donor will be less willing to give again (to them and, to a lesser extent to others) in the future. If I see someone abuse a gift, I'm going to think twice before giving that person a gift myself. People on this list benefit hugely from gift giving (i.e., freely available Haskell compilers and libraries) so we should take care to use gifts in the spirit in which they are intended. In this case, the intentions are clear. This means the gift is not as free as we'd like but, still, the intentions are clear and we should abide by them. -- Alastair Reid alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk Reid Consulting (UK) Limited http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/
There may be a way out of this mess without inventing convenient legal theories. The text you've used is also spread across the manpages included in the glut tarball. Assuming that makes the manpages part of libglut, they would be covered by the permission Michael Weber mentioned: http://www.fifi.org/doc/glutg3-dev/copyright so it should suffice to change the acknowledgement in GLUT.hs to say that your docs are based on the manpages from libglut, by Mark J. Kilgard.
Ross Paterson wrote:
[...] The text you've used is also spread across the manpages included in the glut tarball.
I wasn't aware of that.
Assuming that makes the manpages part of libglut, they would be covered by the permission Michael Weber mentioned:
Cool! Mark's reply on the bottom of that page is far more than we need. I'm a bit surprised though that he suddenly even allows modifications of his library, something which he tried so hard to avoid in the past.
so it should suffice to change the acknowledgement in GLUT.hs to say that your docs are based on the manpages from libglut, by Mark J. Kilgard.
I will gladly do so. Would this calm down everybody here? Many thanks to Ross for this Happy End! :-) Cheers, S.
And while we are at this thrilling topic: I'm using the man pages from
SGI's OpenGL sample implementation (SI) as a basis for the documentation of
the OpenGL part. This is in accordance to SGI's license
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/FreeB/
which was confirmed by Jon Leech (see below). The only thing currently
missing is the SGI copyright notice at the start page of the documentation,
something which is on my ToDo list for a long time :-}. It will be added
very soon, so we should be on the legal track here...
Cheers,
S.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jon Leech
I have a small non-technical question about the license of the SI: Would it be OK to use the SI's man pages as a basis for the online documentation of my open source OpenGL binding for Haskell? (http://haskell.org/HOpenGL) I had a look a the "SGI Free Software License B", but without being a lawyer it is a bit hard to tell. BTW, the project uses literate programming to automatically generate the API documentation from the Haskell sources, so there is no real "separate" documentation for the binding, if this is of any legal significance...
In essence the FreeB license is BSD-like, so you can do almost anything with material covered by it other than change or remove the license applied to that material. If you were to integrate material from the SI man pages into your bindings and include the SGI copyright notice along with the material you integrated, that would be OK with us. I imagine there would be a significant problem with this scheme if your code is under an incompatible license like GPL, though. Jon Leech SGI
participants (3)
-
Alastair Reid -
Ross Paterson -
Sven Panne