Re: gnuplot-mode and Gnuplot licensing question

[sfeam (E. Merritt) <eam...@gm...>]

On Wednesday, 08 February 2012, Jonathan Oddie wrote:
> Hi Gnuplot developers,
> 
> I've been working on an add-on module for Bruce Ravel's Emacs
> gnuplot-mode, to add context-sensitive completion and documentation
> lookup for Gnuplot script buffers. It does a fairly complete parse of
> the Gnuplot language so it should hopefully be quite useful once I
> finish writing the rest of the grammar rules.
> 
> I'd like to release this sometime soon and my question has to do with
> licensing. I would like my Elisp code to be GPL'ed (in fact it
> probably has to be since it extends gnuplot.el, which is
> GPL'ed). However, it has the ability to show short documentation
> strings ("ElDoc") to display in the mode line depending on what's at
> point, and the easiest way of getting these would be to copy them out
> of the Gnuplot info manual. I know Gnuplot itself is not under the GPL
> and so I'm not sure whether this would be against its license terms.
> 
> Could anyone tell me whether this would be considered acceptable use?

I don't understand the intended mechanism.

Are you saying that this new code would act as a viewer for the
existing documentation?  That would not introduce any licensing issues
that I can think of.  You can use any viewer you like.  I'm sure 
some people use the Acrobat reader to view the PDF documentation,
for instance, and Acrobat certainly isn't under the gnuplot license.

If you're saying that you want to maintain a new, parallel, set of
documentation, I think that's a bad idea.  It would be far too much
trouble to keep it in sync.

	Ethan


> 
> Thanks,
> Jonathan
> 
> 
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