A rather fascinating discussion is going on on gnome-i18n (which has spilled over onto legal-list and kde-i18n-doc) over the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo translations I mentioned last month. The current questions are:
- Is a translation of a program a derived work within the terms of that program’s licence?
- If something should have been released under the GPL, because it’s a derived work of something else that is known to have been released under the GPL, how much can we assume it was released under the GPL?
- Since compiled translations can be trivially decompiled, should the compiled (.mo) versions be forced to store licence information found in the source files (.po)?
- If so, does this mean we should expect build tools to force all compiled software to carry licence information?
If you’re going to weigh in, it’s better to weigh in there than here.
Photo (c) Melvin “Buddy” Baker, cc-by.
Derivative works are not defined by licenses, they are defined by copyright law and treaties like the Berne Convention. And translations have been treated as derivative works for hundreds of years. So this isn’t a close case; it’s obvious that translations are derivative works.
But: If something “should have” been released under the GPL but wasn’t, it’s a violation of the license. The violator is a copyright infringer (perhaps an accidental one). But others cannot then treat the work as if it were GPL. Instead, you have to treat it like an illegal work until th e violation is cleaned up.
In particular, the GPL is not “viral” in the sense that it automatically relicenses code that it touches. This widely held belief is false. Only the copyright holder can set license terms.
One of the oddities of this case is that we don’t know whether the translations were released under GPL or not, and so we don’t know whether it’s reasonable to assume they followed the terms of the licence.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s *reasonable* from a legal standpoint. You have to license all files explicitly, otherwise it falls under your local copyright. And that is not at all GPL or anything like it. So hopefully you can still track down the original author(s) and ask for their agreement. Otherwise you really can’t use these files, legally.
All the more reason to start putting licence details into the .po headers, I feel.