racket
[Question] What is the license of the generated scribble HTML, LaTeX and PDF documents?
Hi,
Scribble includes a large block of HTML code in the headers of the generated document, along with CSS and JS files. It similarly includes a large number of LaTeX headers, and the PDF output can be considered a "compiled" form of the LaTeX code (thereby a derivative?).
The current license is the LGPL, and IIUC we're going to switch to MIT + Apache v2 at some point in the near future.
What impact do these blobs of HTML and LaTeX have on the license of the source document, and on the license of the generated HTML / LaTeX / PDF ?
I'm pretty sure that the HTML and LaTeX versions are tainted in some way. For example, the CSS files embed fonts, so it seems impossible to publish the HTML version online, and say that "this document is in the public domain / CC0", as this could implicitly cover the fonts, which are explicitly stated as being under the SIL Open Font License. I would guess that the generated LaTeX code is similarly tainted, at least in the sense that the portion of the preamble which is injected into the documentation is covered by Scribble's license, and distinguishing what parts are affected by it, and the distinction between what parts remain under the license of the original author seems vague, if at all possible.
It wouldn't be much of a stretch to have a literate program licensed under the GPL (not LGPL), therefore tainting both its source and documentation via linking, and tainting the fonts, which are embedded in the CSS files which are "linked" to the HTML file. This obviously sound like a legal swamp, and this example use case relies on terms like "linking" having no satisfying definition in the modern programming world, and the use of the GPL (which is not adapted to documentation) on a literate program. This is therefore not a very reasonable example, but hopefully it highlights some of the issues that the average "IANAL" developer may be concerned with, knowingly or not.
Could we therefore try to explicitly indicate what are the legal implications of writing and rendering documents with scribble, when using the default LaTeX prefix and the main HTML styles shipped with scribble (scribble/manual and scribble/base)?
