Re: Motivations; proposed alternative license
walter landry wrote (inter alia)
> Here is a hypothetical. Let's say that someone wants to add support
> for Klingon into Latex. So they hack something together which, by
> necessity, changes a few standard files, and it works for them without
> breaking anything else. You reject the patch because it isn't really
> a good i18n solution, it only works for Klingon. You also think that
> Klingon is a silly thing to add support for, so you'll probably never
> add it in. However, for the people interested in writing Klingon
> (e.g. Hollywood screen writers and trek fan fiction writers), this is
> a good solution. In this case, you are preventing people from having
> seamless support for Klingon.
a practical comment: we don't work like that.
a klingon support package might very well patch some latex internals;
it will presumably provide some fonts, and so on. this is all allowed
(even members of the latex team publish packages that patch latex
internals -- mine were written long before i joined the team).
it's quite possible that this putative package wouldn't work well with
babel (which is the nearest thing we have to an i18n solution). so
what? it wasn't written to work with babel, and to first order it
doesn't matter (in reality it's an english-and-klingon package, at
best). of course, many babel language modules started as mono- or
bilingual packages, and that option would be open to people interested
in this klingon thing.
is this whole argument operating on the basis that the debian-legal
people believe we (the latex team) have to approve every submission
made? that someone who submits a package that incidentally patches
latex internals is somehow contravening the latex licence?
(i don't suppose so, but it would be nice if one could so neatly
square the present circular argument.)
robin
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