Re: doxygen, GPL incompatibility of FDL, and the horror

[Mike Stump <mrs at apple dot com>]

On Saturday, May 24, 2003, at 07:30 PM, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Just realized that the doxygen docs in libstdc++-v3 are under the FDL.
> The files they take information out of are under the GPL.  This is
> legitimate only because the FSF owns the copyrights and can release 
> them
> under any damn copyright it likes. :-/
>
> This appears to make the following scenario illegal for anyone who
> hasn't assigned all their copyrights to the FSF (or indeed someone who
> has, but doesn't have the FSF's permission to modify copyrights)
> * I modify the doxygen comments.
> * I rerun doxygen.
> * I distribute the resulting documentation.
>
> Gah!
>
> On the more immediate note, anyone who contributed any doxygenated text
> to libstdc++-v3 is a contributor to the manual, and according to RMS, 
> if
> they don't have a post-January 2000 copyright statement, we shouldn't
> use their work, which means we can't rerun doxygen.

If I understand this correctly...

Docs are generated from GPL source.  We want the generated docs to be 
covered by some other copyright.

Solution, have the FSF officially bless this and then document it as a 
blessed transformation.

Essentially what the FSF blesses is the idea that certain bits of the 
GPL source are also under another license (FDL), and that one is 
permitted to so convert these bits into stand alone content (a set of 
html pages for example), and that content is FDL covered.

Informally, I think that this really is a non-issue, but, because it 
touches legal things, it does really need to be discussed with the FSF 
and proposed and accepted and documented for all to understand.  Thanks 
for bringing it up.