Re: User's thoughts about LPPL

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Frank Mittelbach <frank.mittelbach@latex-project.org> 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.

I must have missed something.  Why will the special-non-latex detect
that it is not the real latex?  I didn't think that it had internal
checks (which I could take out anyway).  Why would the end user know
that anything different has happened?  Unless they read the output,
which I thought the LPPL people thought didn't happen enough.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu

p.s. Thanks a lot, Frank, for keeping up the discussion.  I'm amazed
at your stamina.


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