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### Copyright & Copyleft

Ramanathan Muthaiah [rus.cahimb at gmail.com]

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 00:05:16 +0530

Just wondering, why all the GNU/Linux man pages refer to copyright only and do not have no reference / brief statement regd "copyleft".

Quicky browsing through the "http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html", I did understand that this concept of copyleft is incorporated by applying copyright and then adding terms of distribution.

To quote from the above URL,

"To copyleft a program, we first state that it is copyrighted; then we add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code or any program derived from it but only if the distribution terms are unchanged . . . "

Any thoughts ?

/Ram

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Neil Youngman [ny at youngman.org.uk]

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 08:23:13 +0100

On or around Tuesday 02 October 2007 19:35, Ramanathan Muthaiah reorganised a bunch of electrons to form the message:

    > Just wondering, why all the GNU/Linux man pages refer to copyright
    > only and do not have no reference / brief statement regd "copyleft".
    >
    > Quicky browsing through the
    > "http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html", I did understand that
    > this concept of copyleft is incorporated by applying copyright and
    > then adding terms of distribution.
    >
    > To quote from the above URL,
    >
    > "To copyleft a program, we first state that it is copyrighted; then we
    > add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives
    > everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's
    > code or any program derived from it but only if the distribution terms
    > are unchanged . . . "
    >
    > Any thoughts ?

Not everything in a typical GNU/Linux is "copyleft" and different contributors will have different approaches. If you look at man pages for code where the FSF owns the copyright, e.g. emacs, you will see that they state their copyright and add distribution terms, as quoted above.

Many other man pages are for code owned by other people who have a less rigorous approach to copyright notices. Many man pages don't contain a copyright notice at all.

Even the FSF man pages don't state the copyright for the code itself, just the copyright on the man page.

HTH

Neil Youngman

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Martin J Hooper [martinjh at blueyonder.co.uk]

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:21:16 +0100

Neil Youngman wrote:

    > Even the FSF man pages don't state the copyright for the code itself, just the
    > copyright on the man page.

But given that it is a FSF man page it could be inferred that it is GPL no?

(Or whatever the GPL equivalent for documents is)

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