[HOpenGL] Re: GLUT documentation

[C.Reinke]

Extrapolating from other dialogues documented on the web, I would
guess the issue is not contacting Mark, but that he seems to be
rather fed up with the kind of requests he gets about anything GLUT:

  http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/970/2001/5/0/5707055/

  http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/970/2001/5/0/5709066/

  http://groups.google.com/groups?q=mjk%40nvidia.com&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=20020215162504.GA7165%40x8b4e53d6.dhcp.okstate.edu&rnum=9

Even if he doesn't just filter out GLUT license email by now, he
seems unlikely to respond to any request involving modifications to
what he has stated previously (in particular, in the licenses). The
licenses are not as freewheeling as we'd like, but they are there.

The license for the docs looks even worse than the one for the code,
but for the latter, the idea seems to be "it's *not* open source,
and you're not permitted to put a GPL on it, but you're free to use
it exactly as it is. you may even modify it, but then you need to
change the name and make it clear that it is not in any way endorsed
by the original author, whose license you still have to preserve".

You don't distribute the GLUT docs anyway, but point to the GLUT
section on the opengl site (which, fortunately, seems to have been
authored by Mark, suggesting that the docs have a right to be
there). For anything else GLUT, you either use it as it is,
precisely, or you give it a new name to reflect that it isn't GLUT.

Calling it HGlut, and listing the differences to GLUT, should do for
the source. For the documentation, isn't it possible to refer to the
GLUT docs for things that haven't changed, and to document
explicitly only the changes? Last time I looked at the HOpenGL
sources, they tended to state things like "this module implements
pages xxx of the GLUT spec, with the following modifications"..

Claus

sometimes, free things come at a price


> No, I haven't been able yet to contact Mark Kilgard in any way. I've
> tried several times, but never received an answer, neither positive
> nor negative. I've sent mails directly to Mark's current company, NVIDIA,
> and tried to contact him via 'Mr. OpenGL' himself, John Leech at SGI,
> without avail.
> 
> Other projects (Mesa, several other OpenGL bindings, ...) simply use
> the documentation rather unchanged, but obviously don't care about
> legal issues. The HOpenGL-GLUT docs are *not* simply a cut-n-paste job,
> the API is quite different from the C API, so I finally got a bit fed up
> with this legal issue...   >:-(
> 
> I'm a little bit clueless about how to proceed. Perhaps I should nuke
> the above passage from the documentation and replace it with credits
> to Mark.