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

[Linas Vepstas]

2010/1/15 Francis Tyers <ftyers at prompsit.com>:
> 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" ?

Well, IANAL, but ...

if we take the previously mentioned
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput
to heart, then the answer would be "yes, of course" -- that faq entry
seems to imply that there's no legal way of licensing a tool (any tool)
to restrict the use of the tool. (Err, unless the tool is a gun, an x-ray
machine or something that's dangerous enough to require a govt. license
to operate but even then there's little restriction on use once you have
the license).

(I'm assuming your initial corpus was GPL'ed to begin with)

--linas

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