Doxygen for commercial documentation?

[Ethan Metsger]

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:48:14 -0500, Moshe Kruger (AllWrite)  
<moshe.kruger at gmail.com> wrote:

> The GNU GPL limits the distribution of software. It seems, therefore,  
> that
> your question seems invalid as far as documentation goes, for in the  
> case of
> documention *no software* is distributed.

I mentioned this off list, I think, but the GPL only applies to software  
released under its provisions.  The documentation you create for your  
software is not governed by the GPL, and it seems legally tenuous for any  
license to claim authority over its generated artifacts.  (My company is  
in the code generation business, and our license doesn't restrict the  
distribution of generated code.)

The full text of the GPL can be found at http://www.innodb.com/gpl.txt  
(this is version 2; version 3 came out last year).  The pertinent clause:

0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a  
notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under  
the terms of this General Public License.  The "Program", below, refers to  
any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either  
the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a  
work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with  
modifications and/or translated into another language.  (Hereinafter,  
translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".)   
Each licensee is addressed as "you".


Generated documentation is not "based on the program" because it doesn't  
contain any of Doxygen's source code at all.  You could have your legal  
guys dissect this, but I'm pretty confident you shouldn't have any issues  
distributing doxygen-generated documentation due to licensing  
constraints.  You could also simply write to the maintainers to ask.


Best,

Ethan (emetsger at obj-sys.com)
http://uppertank.net/ethanm/