Post by Mingjie XingHello,
I think maybe this is a good place to ask a question about GFDL. Say I
am going to write a book talking about the implementation of a GPLed
software. Many source code will be quoted and analyzed in the book. So
my question, is there any constraint about the publishing book? Must
the book be covered as GFDL? Thanks.
First, let's talk licenses. GFDL and GPL are two separate licenses
created and published by the Free Software Foundation. Although both
leverage copyleft principles, there's no requirement in either license
to use the other.[0]
---
Now let's talk about copyright. Laws vary from country to country, but
generally speaking one may quote short passages of copyrighted works
for purposes of commentary. To quote the US Copyright Office[1], some
examples that courts have found to be Fair Use include:
"quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of
illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or
technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s
observations;...reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part
of a work to illustrate a lesson"
So if your inclusions of code are short, relative to the rest of the
work, and/or if you are directly critiquing the software, then the
inclusion of the copyrighted content may qualify as Fair Use.
In your case it doesn't sound like you're talking about multiple FOSS
projects spanning multiple codebases, but just about a single project.
If you're using a substantial amount of source code in the book, one
option would be to adopt the GPL license of the code itself. This is
perhaps the easiest option, as you then may modify/write/quote/etc..
as much or as little of the codebase as you like, and feel quite
confidently protected by the terms of the GPL.
Another great option is to first talk with the authors of the software
about your project, and then send them your proposal. Getting written
permission from them to write about (and include sections of) the
software under a particular license (e.g. GFDLv1.3 or CC-BY-SA 4.0)
will not only put you on a stronger legal foundation, it will
hopefully give you better access to members of the project if you have
any questions about the codebase while writing your book.
Good luck!
--R,
IANAL but I know too many of them... :-)
[0] The GFDL describes the GPL as being "complimentary" and suggests
that one might dual-license (under the GPL) any significant code
chunks in a GFDL-licensed document.
[1] http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html