Re: Motivations; proposed alternative license
William F Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu> wrote:
> (And is it the case that one or both of these lists is filtering the
> name of the other list from message headers? IMO discussion on this
> issue _should_ _be_ sent to both.)
The latex list rejected my email. Presumably because I'm not
subscribed to it.
> The major point is that both (1) LaTeX classes and (2) LaTeX
> packages, as well as the associated literate programming wrappers and
> "latex" itself, are _very_ _different_ animals from what is normally
> called a program, i.e., a C program, a GNU Emacs Lisp program, ... .
>
> Neither GPL nor GPPL makes much sense for LaTeX objects.
The GPL has been used for printed books. I fail to see how it can not
be applied to Latex. The problem is that the latex project has goals
(quite reasonable goals which I otherwise support) which are not really
compatible with free software.
> LaTeX users do not make such changes. Something in document source
> called "\newcommand" is the LaTeX user's way to customize.
>
> Let's not confuse the LaTeX user with the person who changes a LaTeX
> package without renaming it, thereby causing the user's 15 year
> archive of LaTeX source to break.
There are many programs in Debian that normal users will never have to
modify. Things like cp, rm, ls, etc. Debian still requires the
ability to make and distribute changes, for practical and ideological
reasons.
> > > It is certainly (a bit) more work to rename a file rather than to
> > > simply change it, but while I concur with you that for stuff which
> > > is essentially local to my environment this is fine (and thus
> > > something like GPL or whatever is appropriate) for the benefit of
> > > LaTeX as a freely extensible and changeable system for exchange of
> > > information it is not.
> >
> > I hope you'll agree with me that this statement is a subjective
> > analysis.
>
> Isn't it rather a rather practical and pragmatic analysis based on
> long experience?
Debian has different experiences than you, apparently. Debian likes
to be able to freely modify the program in order to make it work
better or improve security.
> Please work with Frank on this.
Debian would love to work with Frank on this, but it has principles
which it can not change. There are many good programs by good people
in the non-free archives, and that is, unfortunately, where I see
Latex headed.
Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu
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