Re: User's thoughts about LPPL
> Err, are you sure this is largely due to the license change, and not to
> other changes in the Unix world?
I don't want to disapoint you but it's most likely true that most tex
use doesn't happen in the unix world:-) (although as it happens a good
part of latex was written on a Debian system...)
It's hard to guess exactly why things happen, but conversely that
stability has been very important and I wouldn't want to risk it
lightly by a careless change to the licence.
It seems to me that we can address all the technical issues that have
been raised with LPPL.
I think the one area where there will probably be disagreement is over
the "renaming rule" however that eventually gets worded.
However the disagreements there from the Debian side seem to be
characterisable as "it can't work" or "I'd have no respect for someone
who uses such a licence". It seems to me that's fine, we're not asking
people to think it's necessarily the best licence in the world and use
it on all their software. Just to accept that it is a free licence in
the sense of the DFSG. That is the good thing about the guidelines;
they acknowledge that one licence can not be suitable for all programs
and that a range of licences needs to be supported. It was always the
intention that LPPL met the guidelines and so it seems unlikely that
given a relatively small amount of rewording we can not get something
that everyone does agree meets the guidelines.
As someone commented earlier just meeting the guidelines isn't
necessarily enough for Debian to distribute the program in their free
tree. Which is also true, It's up to Debian to decide how to lay out
their distribution and can take whatever decision they want on a case by
case basis.
David
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