Re: LilyPond, LilyPond snippets and the GPL

[Hans Åberg]

> On 31 Oct 2019, at 21:31, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> All those parts should be LGPL, and also included headers, I believe:
>> Not GPL, because that would legal technically force copyright
>> limitations on the output, and not public domain, because then one
>> could exploit the inputs in ways you do not want. But check with the
>> experts.
> 
> I think this kind of stuff should just be exempt from licensing (namely
> declared public domain) like stub code in GCC.  It doesn't survive into
> PDF anyway (since PDF is not programmable and so the PostScript-to-PDF
> conversion executes the code in question rather than converting it) and
> it is very unusual to distribute PostScript these days instead of
> executing it right away in the form of some document processing
> workflow.
> 
> So that is indeed something that would warrant getting separate
> appropriate licensing attention, but in most use cases it would end up
> not being relevant since there are few workflows where a PostScript file
> ends up as something to be distributed.

It is only a problem if code survives in the output and is copyrightable. Like 
glyph designs, for example, there are in the works new microtonal accidentals, 
the design of which I figure would be copyrightable, and take a long time to 
develop. Would you want them to be in the public domain? It would mean that the 
design could be exploited freely without acknowledgement. With LGPL, any 
altered design must have the same license, but the glyphs can be used freely in 
publications.