Hi Nigel,
> When Firebird split away from Borland, were there any agreements on
> how much info from the IB6 docs could be used in documentation for
> Firebird?
No. They didn't include the docs in the IPL package. We asked them
several times if we could use those docs "as if the fell under the
IPL". They never answered.
> Percentages? No cut and paste (But manual typing allowed)?
For copyrights it doesn't matter *how* you copy text. Whether you
copy-and-paste or retype, as soon as it's more than a loose sentence
here and there it's a possible copyright violation.
All this goes for the text. The information as such is public, and we
can use it.
> Can we use the framework, but not the content(and come up with the
> content ourselves?)
The framework is a grey area, I think. Copyright laws protect
everything that's unique in a work. Borland could argue that the
document structure is a specific one that *they* came up with, and
that the chance that someone else would *independently* come up with
the same structure is close to zero.
The more general the structure is (think of a reference guide with the
functions ordered alphabetically) the less chance the author can win a
copyright lawsuit if someone else uses it too. (Same goes for text by
the way: try copyrighting "It's raining today".)
Anyway, to be safe I would build my docs from the ground up. But of
course you can learn from existing docs. See what their strong points
are, and what can be done better.
> It'd be just sooo easy to drag and drop...but it's very naughty!
Actually Tilo and I have been doing that for months last year. But it
was a DRAG and we decided to DROP it when it became clear that Borland
just wouldn't give permission to publish our homework ;-)
With hindsight, it has only cost us time. It just was the wrong track.
> (PocketBooks are now continuing)
> http://oc.aims.net.au/pb/fb/
I'll have a look.
Greetings,
Paul Vinkenoog
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