[Corpora-List] Licensing output of a GPL'd morphological analyser

[Francis Tyers]

El dv 15 de 01 de 2010 a les 14:42 +0000, en/na Jimmy O'Regan va
escriure:
> 2010/1/15 Adam Radziszewski <kocikikut at gmail.com>:
> > Dear corpora users,
> > we've got a formal problem with understanding of GPL licences when
> > applied to a morphological analyser and its output. I'm sure someone
> > before has dealt with a similar issue (and this may be of interest to
> > others as well), so I'm asking for help here.
> >
> > Let's assume a morphological analyser is released under GPL. It
> > consists of an extensive lexicon (which in binary form is compiled to
> > a transducer) and the actual source code of the transducer and some
> > interface. The analyser reads plain text, tokenises it and outputs a
> > sequence of tokens with sets of tags attached (each word is assigned
> > its entry from the underlying lexicon).
> >
> > The problem is: does the licence require that a corpus which is
> > obtained by running the analyser must be released under a similar
> > licence as well?
> >
> > Why yes: source code is "the preferred form of the work for making
> > modifications to it [a work]" (www.gnu.org), thus in case of such an
> > analyser, it should include the lexicon as well. What the analyser
> > actually does is to systematically dump parts of its lexicon (thus its
> > source code) and attach them to output. So the resulting corpus
> > actually contains parts of the source code of the analyser.
> >
> > Why no: this situation resembles using the GNU compiler. When
> > compiling some code, gcc outputs some parts of its components to
> > generate the resulting object/binary. Yet nobody claims that any
> > output of gcc automatically becomes GPL'd.

Would the opposite be true ? Taking a non-free morphological analyser,
and running a corpus through it and publishing the results as GPL ?
Would that be "legal" ? 

Fran (NAL)


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