[HOpenGL] OpenGL documentation license [was: GLUT copyright violation]

Sven Panne Sven_Panne@BetaResearch.de
Mon, 24 Mar 2003 10:20:27 +0100


And while we are at this thrilling topic: I'm using the man pages from
SGI's OpenGL sample implementation (SI) as a basis for the documentation of
the OpenGL part. This is in accordance to SGI's license

   http://oss.sgi.com/projects/FreeB/

which was confirmed by Jon Leech (see below). The only thing currently
missing is the SGI copyright notice at the start page of the documentation,
something which is on my ToDo list for a long time :-}. It will be added
very soon, so we should be on the legal track here...

Cheers,
   S.

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From: Jon Leech <ljp@oddhack.engr.sgi.com>
To: Sven Panne <Sven_Panne@BetaResearch.de>
Subject: Re: SI license

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 02:32:15PM +0200, Sven Panne wrote:
> I have a small non-technical question about the license of the SI:
> Would it be OK to use the SI's man pages as a basis for the online
> documentation of my open source OpenGL binding for Haskell?
> (http://haskell.org/HOpenGL) I had a look a the "SGI Free Software
> License B", but without being a lawyer it is a bit hard to tell.  BTW,
> the project uses literate programming to automatically generate the
> API documentation from the Haskell sources, so there is no real
> "separate" documentation for the binding, if this is of any legal
> significance...

    In essence the FreeB license is BSD-like, so you can do almost
anything with material covered by it other than change or remove the
license applied to that material.

    If you were to integrate material from the SI man pages into your
bindings and include the SGI copyright notice along with the material
you integrated, that would be OK with us. I imagine there would be a
significant problem with this scheme if your code is under an
incompatible license like GPL, though.

    Jon Leech
    SGI