Re: spokesman (was Re: User's thoughts about LPPL)
>>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff Licquia <licquia@debian.org> writes:
Jeff> On Wed, 2002-07-17 at 01:31, Frank Mittelbach wrote:
>> Branden Robinson writes: > Perhaps the LaTeX community should
>> appoint a spokesman to the Debian > Project so that we do not
>> get contradictory statements about what is > acceptable?
>>
>> Branden, pardon me, but i think this is funny. seems that you
>> think the LaTeX community needs as spokesman which is the very
>> thing that I think debian needs.
Jeff> I'm curious. From my perspective, the Debian people seem
Jeff> not to have been contradicting themselves so far; I
But we do seem to be contradicting our actions and unclear on the
implications of DFSG 4.
I think DFSG 4 means that you can require renaming or patch files of
the sources. It also seems that you can require renaming of the distributions.
What Debian finds unacceptable is the assertion that we must break the
TeX or LaTeX API (hey you said it was a language) in order to make
some changes.
I.E. if we find a bug in article.cls, it's not OK to rename that file
because then \documentclass{article} will either fail or get the old
file rather than our changed version. The argument is that in
practice we cannot follow DFSG 3 because we cannot change the software
and maintain API compatibility with existing documents if we fix bugs.
The TeX license is OK because it mandates what we call the program,
but does not say anything about the API. Even if the binary is called
uglytex, it's still easy for me to run it over .tex files. If those
files use macros defined in plain.tex, those macrso can (at our
option) continue to work in uglytex.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: