Re: GLUT documentation

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 01:16:08PM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:
> Ross Paterson wrote:
> > According to fptools/libraries/GLUT/Graphics/UI/GLUT.hs, the documentation
> > of the GLUT package is derived from a document with the notice
> > 
> > > Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 by Mark J. Kilgard, Silicon Graphics, Inc.
> > > No part of this documentation may be reproduced, in any form or by any
> > > means, without permission in writing from the original author.
> > 
> > Do you have this permission, and if so what are its limits?
> 
> No, I haven't been able yet to contact Mark Kilgard in any way. I've
> tried several times, but never received an answer, neither positive
> nor negative. I've sent mails directly to Mark's current company, NVIDIA,
> and tried to contact him via 'Mr. OpenGL' himself, John Leech at SGI,
> without avail.
> 
> Other projects (Mesa, several other OpenGL bindings, ...) simply use
> the documentation rather unchanged, but obviously don't care about
> legal issues. The HOpenGL-GLUT docs are *not* simply a cut-n-paste job,
> the API is quite different from the C API, so I finally got a bit fed up
> with this legal issue...   >:-(

I don't see this as a legal issue -- his wishes are dreadfully clear,
unless we hear to the contrary.  It is very inconvenient, but that's
not the same thing.

> I'm a little bit clueless about how to proceed. Perhaps I should nuke
> the above passage from the documentation and replace it with credits
> to Mark.

I'm afraid that nothing but removing all of Mark Kilgard's words would
respect his wishes.  I know that's terrible, but I see no alternative.