Re: User's thoughts about LPPL
21-Jul-02 01:29 Frank Mittelbach wrote:
> Thomas Bushnell, BSG writes:
>> Indeed, I can do two things:
>>
>> Make a derivate work of latex, which is variant, and called
>> "special-non-latex".
>>
>> Make a package with no derivatives of latex at all, which contains a
>> single symlink: 'latex -> special-non-latex'.
>>
>> Happy with that?
> yes.
> for the kernel it is a bit tricky, but for packages under LPPL (and the
> majority of software which was put by their authors under LPPL) it is not
> a problem.
> the moment somebody has a document that loads your fudged package into
> LaTeX ,
> LaTeX will detect that you are trying to sail under a stolen flag and that
> is the whole purpose.
As I understand it's allowed under LPPL to rename, for example,
article.cls to article.fcl and then hack it. And article.fcl
will naturally contain
\ProvidesClass{article}
(and not
\ProvidesClass{article-hacked}
). Now let's create a new article.cls (from scratch) which only
contains
\input{article.fcl}
(there is no need for symlinks really:-)
After that there is no way for LaTeX to detect this hacked class.
This works of course for any package and for the kernel. But for the
kernel the situation is worse. To hack the kernel one can create a new
file which starts with \input latex.ltx [1] and then contains all
necessary redefinitions. The point is that LPPL does not require to
change any identification string or typeout banner in this case
because no LPPLed file is changed.
And this created file can be named latex.tex for example, or .fmt
file after dumping format can be renamed to latex.fmt, or something
like that, so that starting latex as usual will load a hacked format.
[1] In fact it's necessary to redefine \dump temporary because
latex.ltx ends with \dump.
Did I misunderstand LPPL?
Sasha
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