Re: Question(s) for clarifications with respect to the LPPL discussion
Henning Makholm writes:
> I'm sure it will be possible to find a way to *allow* a reasonably
> painless fork without actually encouraging it.
but we do encourage fork! it usually leads to new good results for the whole
community. but we encourage it in a way that it can be live sidelong with the
rest because only in very special cases it would be something where you want
to swap things completely in or out.
> This way does not need to be a continuous extension of the usual
> rules. I think it would be quite acceptable [2] for the Debian side
> of the debate if the LPPL could say something along the lines of
> (in human language, will need to be translated to legalese later):
>
> If you want to fork LaTeX you must do so-and-so (remove banners,
> change all addresses, grep -i latex all over the source to make
> sure nothing remains except in comments that give credit to what
> you used as your starting points, rename latex.ltx to something
> else {which is acceptable because its name does not occur in other
> source files} etc etc etc).
> Once you have done this, you will have a forked project which will
> so far be completely technically equivalent to LaTeX, because
> you're not allowed to modify anything until you've gone through
> the procedure. Now go ahead and hack, and watch your karma drop
> as you do it.
okay, so far, that would already be acceptable under LPPL; but then what? what
exactly do you want to hack then? what is it what you term "LaTeX" here?
> > So why is "don't modify unless you change the name first" the method used
> > in the TeX community to prohibit (c)? Becuase it works!
>
> The problem is that it works too well - it makes it prohibitively
> difficult to do a fork, technically. I'm going to elaborate on this in
> my next message, replying to Frank Mittelbach. Stay tuned.
waiting for it, Lars probably as well
cheers
frank
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