Re: Knuth statement on renaming cm files and Licence violation.
Thomas Bushnell, BSG <tb@becket.net> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>> RMS considered TeX part of the GNU System from the writings that I'm
>> familiar with since very early on in the development of that system, so
>> apparently, at least from that, did not have a problem with the copying
>> policy. I suppose it's possible that he was unaware of it, but that
>> seems very much unlike his normal extreme care with such things.
> TeX doesn't *have* a renaming requirement, actually. You can call the
> files *anything you want*, but you can't call the system "TeX" unless
> you meet certain conditions. Naming requirements on packages and such
> are harmless, naming requirements on *files* are a much different
> question.
The CM fonts are generally considered to be part of the TeX system, since
they're the default fonts, and I believe they've had this renaming
requirement at least for quite some time. I certainly remember it clearly
from when I first started using TeX in the early 1990s and had the
impression that it was fairly old then.
> If the question is "what can our users do", we might well decide that we
> want to interpret things differently, with the goal of arguing (on
> behalf of our users) for the broadest possible freedoms.
Right, I understand your distinction between what Debian does and what its
users do, and it makes sense to me. I just still would never say that
it's okay to break this kind of request, although I might say that it's
legally permissible.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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