Re: Towards a new LPPL draft
Jeff Licquia <licquia@debian.org> writes:
> OK. Now I'd like to hear the Debian side. Here are the conditions for
> modification that are being proposed as I understand them:
>
> - you must rename all modified files, or
>
> - you must rename the whole of LaTeX in your modified copy AND
> distribute a pristine copy of LaTeX as well.
>
> Comments? Branden, Walter, Mark, and Jeremy, I'm especially interested
> in your opinions, since you three are the current objectors.
Yikes. I'd accept the former as free before the latter, personally.
Giving users options is one thing, but option two seems to suggest
that if Latex is forked for some reason we'll need to ferry around the
original (from the date of the fork) version of latex whenever
distributing the new version, forever. That's a far more onerous
requirement than file renaming, imho.
Re the renaming requirement, I disagree with the statement that the
definition of file is a minor technical detail. Do the Latex folks
really want to put this requirement on things like a readme.txt file?
And what if Latex is ported to a filesystem that doesn't have
filenames (or at least, not in the same sense)? Is the directory
structure part of the filename?
I would be very interested in hearing someone from the Latex folks try
to say precisely what should change in order to ensure than no one
accidently use the wrong file from their document. The way a packages
is called from a document (but that's potentially broken by the
filename remapping -- perhaps the way it's called, assuming no
remapping)?
But that said, I'm not very certain in my own mind about the file
naming issue. I'm uncomfortable with it, but there does seem to be a
good reason for it (whether that reason is arguable is completely
separate issue). But if we can't come up with a better way to make
the restriction, I'm not going to say we should keep it out of Debian.
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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