Re: GFDL/GPL issues

[Basile Starynkevitch <basile at starynkevitch dot net>]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 17:44 -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> 
> Therefore, if I don't have an update "soon" (within a week or two), I'd
> suggest that we operate under the assumption that it will not be
> possible to combine GFDL manuals and GPL code in the near future.


Thanks for the feedback.

However, could you (or some other well informed person) elaborate on
that incompatibility. What exactly is incompatible? Is it some paragraph
of GPLv3 versus another paragraph of GFDL1.2 - which ones? Or why is it
incompatible?

My feeling is that the main thing affected is perhaps the right to
redistribute a modification of such generated documentation. But very
sincerely, I don't understand the issue, except that the generated
documentation will be both GPL & GFDL licensed.

Apparently, it should be either specific to GPL (not to LGPL), to GFDL,
or should be an *interpretation* of the FSF. (A contrario, GTK headers
do contain comments which produce documentation, and these GTK headers
seems to be stricto LGPLv2+. At least, file <gtk/gtkwidget.h> only
mentions LGPLv2 and does not mention any exception and that same file is
used to generate the
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2.21/GtkWidget.html page).

Assuming it won't be solved in a few weeks, do you imagine that it could
be solved by : a change of the GPL (so we have to wait for an
hypothetical GPLv4), a change of the GCC runtime license, something
else?

This matters practically for timescale reasons. Waiting for GPLv4 means
waiting probably nearly twenty years (and by that time, GCC will
probably cease to be relevant, and perhaps even to be actively be
developed). Waiting for a change of the GCC runtime might mean waiting
for 2 or 4 years.

Cheers.
-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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