Copyleft and the GPL: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Guide
a1b059184c
Software Freedom Law Center, a small law firm specializing in Open Source, recently published its so-called "Guide to GPL Compliance, Second Edition": http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2014/SFLC-Guide_to_GPL_Compliance_2d_ed.html The Firm's document is substantially less comprehensive than this one; however, their document contained a few phrases and paragraphs that seemed useful and accurate. This commit incorporates the useful material from that work into this one (as permitted by the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, which the Software Freedom Law Center applied to their work). The useful sections have been pasted without proper textual integration into the appropriate sections of this tutorial. A few are currently commented out entirely and marked with appropriate FIXME's. Meanwhile, the text that seems immediately useful is *not* commented out, and is marked with "FIXME-URGENT". Additional work is now required to integrate the new text properly into this tutorial. Careful readers who compare this commit with The Firm's document will find that I passed on inclusion of some seemingly useful material. Unfortunately, The Firm's text contained some inaccuracies, and frames discussion primarily from a for-profit perspective. More disturbingly, a few statements even directly contradicted the FSF's stated policies. Of course, The Firm clearly claims "this document does not express the views, intentions, policy, or legal analysis of any SFLC clients or client organizations", but I could not in good conscience adopt, as the official advice in this tutorial, any text that conflicts with the FSF's policies, nor will I incorporate any puffery that subtly kowtows to for-profit corporate interests. Nevertheless, given The Firm's perceived stature, I briefly considered including policy-conflicting statements, attributing them as alternative third-party opinions; many of the FSF's own opinions were already incorporated in that manner earlier this year. Indeed, I will not prima facie reject future patches that integrate such statements naturally for this tutorial. However, I feel that the didactic value of including The Firm's attributed dissenting opinions in this tutorial does not outweigh my editing effort required for such additional textual integration. Regarding Software Freedom Law Center's copyrights included herein, I took the following specific actions to comply with CC By SA 4.0: §3(a)(1)(a)(i): This log message indicates Software Freedom Law Center as the source of the material herein committed. §3(a)(1)(a)(i): Copyright notices at the top level of the document, as well as those in individual parts, are updated to include the 2014 copyright notice from the Software Freedom Law Center. §3(a)(1)(a)(ii-v): The project already referred to and included a copy §3(b)(1): of CC BY SA 4.0 International and its URL. §3(a)(2): The attribution information is fully included in this Git repository. §3(a)(3): I and this project have received no such request. §3(b)(1): The license of the larger work was already CC BY SA 4.0 International. §3(b)(3): No such conditions are imposed. |
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| Case-Study-Ethics | ||
| css | ||
| enforcement-case-studies_log-output | ||
| GPL-Business | ||
| GPL-LGPL | ||
| js | ||
| presentations/1hr-GPL | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| CC-By-SA-4.0.txt | ||
| compliance-guide.tex | ||
| comprehensive-gpl-guide.tex | ||
| enforcement-case-studies.tex | ||
| gpl-lgpl.tex | ||
| license-texts.tex | ||
| Makefile | ||
| no-numbers-on-table-of-contents.tex | ||
| README.md | ||
| tex4ht.usr | ||
| TODO.md | ||
| webhacks.cfg | ||
Copyleft and GPL Tutorial Materials
This repository contains various tutorial materials regarding the suite of GNU General Public Licenses and copyleft (as applied to software).
The primary item of interest is an omnibus book on copyleft that is built from the comprehensive-GPL-guide.tex file.
You can build this project with the following command:
$ make
HTML output will be in the public_html directory and a PDF file will be in comprehensive-gpl-guide.pdf.
You may need to first install texlive, tex4ht and a few other things. On Debian-based systems, this command may work as root:
# aptitude install texlive-full make tex4ht
You can also download a prebuilt PDF file.
Note the canonical repository for this project is on gitorious. Copies of this repository on other sites is for informational and backup purposes only.
Contributing
Patches to this project are welcome. Please submit a merge request on Gitorious. If you cannot use that, you can email patches directly to Bradley. You can find his email address in the commit logs.