RE: hold off until the copyright can be clarified

On 2004-09-03 17:56:16 +0100 Anton van Straaten 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> [...] Selling a book
> based on a compilation of LGPL material is certainly legal and within 
> the
> spirit of both the GPL and LGPL - every commercial Linux distribution 
> does
> exactly that.
> 
> The question is whether other people would have the right to copy 
> that book
> and sell it themselves.  Our agreement with contributors says they 
> can't.
> Anyone who wants to can try copying the book and selling it: in that 
> case,
> our publisher could choose to sue them.  Worst case, the publisher 
> might
> lose that suit for some reason.
> 
> So, what exactly is it we're worrying about?

At the moment, you have contributions under the LGPL-2.1 (I hope... my 
comments at the meeting about program-specific wording apply to an 
earlier LGPL). Clause 1 appears to be pretty clear that a compilation 
would be a derived work, while clause 2c requires that the entire 
derived work be available under LGPL-2.1 too. Clause 4 cannot be used 
for a book without very careful agreed definition of source and object 
forms, which you don't have, so how are you planning to take the 
LGPL-covered compilation non-free?

Perhaps I should be quiet and let $RANDOM_large_contributor start 
threatening you with copyright infringement lawsuits just before you 
try to publish under a !LGPL...

I really can't see many answers which won't scare any 
free-software-copyright-fearing publishers away, so you probably still 
only have free-friendly publishers to choose from. Either fix your 
copyright bug, or pledge to put the entire thing under a free licence.

> [...] we want to be able to give a publisher some copyright 
> protection.
> BSD/MIT/X11 alone won't do that, afaict.

MIT/X11 allows you to use a non-free licence on a derived work if you 
wish. LGPL doesn't. Writing "this is LGPL but we're going to make a 
non-free derived source work" is nonsense.

-- 
MJR/slef    My Opinion Only and not of any group I know
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing
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