Re: User's thoughts about LPPL
> David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> writes:
> > 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".
I regret making that comment, and I apologize for it. <begins digging
deeper> I intended to say that I have less respect for someone who demands
control over his work than someone who is willing to let it be free.
This is very different from "I have no respect.".
In fact, I have a great deal of respect for both the latex developers for
making an extremely useful and stable piece of software, and for the latex
license people who've been willing to wade into this discussion. It could
increase further by coming up with less restrictive license terms, but in
no case will it become zero. ;)
On 23 Jul 2002, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Um, no. The real objection is: it's not DFSG free.
> The other comments are attempts to convince you to switch, by pointing
> out that the requirement doesn't actually achieve your goals, and that
> there is a better way to achieve them.
Exactly. Some of this may have been unclear, as there were parts of my
messages that were intended to explore whether your intent was actually
free and parts that hoped to convince you to relax your requirements, and
I didn't delineate them well.
Opinion of intent:
Understanding your goal a bit , I think I can state that it is not
possible to release software that is both free and prevents users from
being given a modified copy. The question remains whether an
implementation of these goals can be found that is weak enough to still be
free and strong enough to discourage unnecessary forks.
Recommendation:
Better, IMO, would be for your requirement to be less general than "users
must expect that documents work the same on all derived works of latex".
We could easily find a way to accomodate a requirement "users must be able
to find out that they have a modified version and must be able to get a
pristine copy of the sources".
I believe that the second goal is all you're going to get anyway (from any
semi-free license), so I urge you to adopt that and make a license that
does it well rather than one that does the first badly.
--
Mark Rafn dagon@dagon.net <http://www.dagon.net/>
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