On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 12:43:53AM -0400, Boris Veytsman wrote: > > Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 16:35:42 +1200 > > From: Nick Phillips <nwp@nz.lemon-computing.com> > > Take my company. There are 4 of us working there. I'm quite likely to want > > to make a small modification to some part of LaTeX to make it behave how I > > want it to. It's been a long time since I used LaTeX heavily, so I'm not > > likely to be terribly clued-ep up the "right" way to do things. > Can you make a derivative of a GPL'ed work and distribute it among > your four without giving sources to other three? I remember a > discussion about this in RMS's works, but do not remember the > outcome. The situation with LPPL is exactly the same. To comply with the GPL, you must make source available to your three friends if you give them binaries, although RMS says he doesn't actually care when it comes to such issues. However, *use within a company is not distribution*. Legally speaking, a corporation is a single entity. If the corporation's sysadmin sets up a modified version of LaTeX on the server, so that the corporation's technical writer can do some document rendering, this does not constitute distribution in any legal sense. It is not the sysadmin making the modifications, it is the corporation; it is not the technical writer using the modified code, it is the corporation. Note that your interpretation would also prevent me from hiring a programmer to make changes to a LaTeX macro without also changing the name[1], because "work for hire" now counts as distribution. This seems very non-free to me. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer [1] Though, granted, if I'm hiring a good TeX programmer, I fully expect he would caution me against the dangers of doing this.
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