Re: Licensing (was: Future of openLilyLib)

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

> Am 22.09.2020 um 19:29 schrieb Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net>:

> I am curious- is there a parallel discussion among LaTeX users?  I’ve never 
> used LaTeX nor been part of discussions in the that community, but the 
> operating similarities are strong (a text input file with formatting markup 
> producing an output file such as a PDF).

LaTeX isn’t copylefted, thus the discussion wouldn’t make sense.

see
https://www.latex-project.org/lppl/

According to 
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
LPPL is not compatible with GPL.


But ConTeXt is under GPL (and its documentation under CC BY-NC-SA).
see https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Read_Me
(It’s a bit contradictory, since distributors are also allowed to assume LPPL – 
basically: we want this to be free software, otherwise we don’t care.)

Yes, we had the discussion a few times.
We (the developers and active users of ConTeXt including the members of ConTeXt 
group*) see it like most in this discussion: The license affects only the code 
of ConTeXt itself, never your works, that can’t be works derived of ConTeXt, 
even if they might contain a few lines of code from the core or from examples.

And ConTeXt’s main developer says explicitely: “don't bother discussing licence 
issues and related things with us for the mere sake of discussing licence 
stuff”.


*) BTW, it would make sense to finally found an official LilyPond users group. 
Or several (international associations are legally difficult).


> If one creates a word processing document using a font, whether copyleft or 
> copyright, does the document publishing have to adhere to the licensing of 
> the font?  Of course not.

Font licensing is a completely different problem.

You can’t handle a font as a copyrighted work, otherwise a user would have to 
license every single use of a character!

But a (commercial) font license is meant to allow the free use of a font for 
all projects of one user or company, while the font files shouldn’t get 
published (like in websites), except in non-extractable form (like in PDFs).

With fonts, the threshold of originality is considered too low for copyrighting 
(as a work of art), since the font must work, well, as a font within the 
restrictions of tradition and readability. Only a more or less unreadable font 
would be regarded a work of art.
The legal concept “sweat of the brow” that allows for copyrighting a work of 
craftsmanship only exists in a few jurisdictions.

A font is also not regarded as a program; while it consists of “code”, that was 
not written by a person, but by a graphical application. (Yes, there are 
exceptions, like ours written in MetaFont.)

That means, all commercial font licenses have no legal foundation! The 
international treaty that handles the problem was never ratified by enough 
countries.
That probably also means that free font licenses are mostly obsolete.

IANAL, but I read a lot on that subject.

OT. EOT.

Hraban