Re: Question(s) for clarifications with respect to the LPPL discussion
Scripsit Frank Mittelbach <frank.mittelbach@latex-project.org>
> 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!
I think we have a language program, then. As far as I understand, the
whole point of your licence is to legally prevent people from
distributing something that does almost but not quite what LaTeX does
(viz a lot of arguments about the necessity of having page breaks
being in the same places and so on). That is what I call a fork.
> it usually leads to new good results for the whole community.
If you understood the same thing by "fork" that I do, that would count
as a major contradiction of the goals you stated earlier. What do you
understand by "fork" - or rather, how would you prefer that I refer to
the thing I've been calling a fork?
> > 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;
I cannot see how the current license (or the draft) allows such a
thing. Could you please spell out in greater detail how such a
procedure would be compatible with the renaming requirement?
> but then what? what exactly do you want to hack then?
Anything I want. As I said earlier, the question is not whether I have
a valid reason to change something. I want to be sure that whenever
someone makes up some reason to change something, whether or not I
agree with their particular reason, they will be allowed to do so.
> what is it what you term "LaTeX" here?
Basically all the stuff that implements the relation between .tex
input and .dvi output that is documented by the not-so-short guide
and The LaTeX Companion.
--
Henning Makholm "What has it got in its pocketses?"
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